Heritability and Genes Governing Number of Seeds per Pod in West African Okra Abelmoschus caillei (A. Chev.) Stevels.

Abstract

Heritability and genetic action moderating the inheritance of number of seeds per pod was investigated in four crosses of West African Okra accessions. Parents with variation for number of seeds per pod were used in hybridization process. Generations developed (Parents, F₁, F₂, BC₁ and BC₂) were planted for evaluation in a randomized complete block design with four replications. The results showed the adequacy of the additive – dominance model for one out of the four crosses (Acc6 x Acc1) and the inadequacy of the model for the remaining crosses. This was ascribed to significant estimates of A, B and C scaling test. The results of the generation mean analysis indicated that the additive genetic effect (d) significantly accounted for a large proportion of variability observed for number of seeds per pod in the crosses evaluated. The narrow sense heritability estimates were moderately high in all the crosses. An additive genetic effect suggests that selection among the segregating population could provide an average improvement in the performance of seed yield in subsequent generations.

Keywords: West African Okra, Additive gene action, Generation means, Seed yield, Heritability, Genetic components.