COMBINING ABILITY OFYIELD AND YIELD COMPONENTS IN BREADWHEAT

COMBINING ABILITY OFYIELD AND YIELD COMPONENTS IN BREADWHEAT

Nowadays in most countries wheat is the major staple food for people, so that it provides more than 20 percentof the needed energy of the population in the world(Bushuk and Rasper,1994).Advancement in the yield of wheat requires certain information regarding the nature of combining ability of parents available for use in the hybridization program, and also the nature of gene action involved in expression of quantitative and qualitative traits of economic importance. Knowledge of general and specific combining abilities (GCA, SCA) influencing yield and its components has become increasingly important for plant breeders in the choice of suitable parents for developing potential possessing varieties in many crop plants (Siddique and et al 2004, Joshi et al 2004) Many workers have reported GCA and SCA effects for yield and yield components in wheat (Sameena et al., 2000; Mostafavi and Hosseinzadeh (2004) ,Sharma and sain (2002; Paraksh and Saini (2006). Riaz and chowdhary(2003) have reported some quantitative traits in wheat, in the drought conditions the performance of the components which were under the control of both genes is additive and non additive. .Through diallel analysis a number of parental lines can be tested in all possible combinations. Thus, the main objective of the present study was to identify the best combiners and their crosses on the basis of their general and specific combining ability for yield and its component traits.