Screening of New strains of sugarcane using Augmented Block Designs

Abstract

Sugar production has over time experienced a number of challenges, that is, the choice of the variety to plant; soil nutrients variation and market competition amongst others have greatly affected sugar production. This study has effectively and efficiently employed the technique of experimental designs to ascertain family selection by comparing Augmented Block designs and Randomized Complete block designs. The augmented block design is widely used in breeding programs, particularly in screening and selection of large number of germplasm lines with non-replicated test treatments and replicated control treatments to estimate the experimental errors. The study establishes a relationship between augmented block designs in screening and completely randomized block design in screening new strains of Sugarcane. In the two designs analyzed, we consider 5 test treatments and 2 control treatments for augment design and the same number of treatments for Randomized Complete Block Design. In the event of screening new sugarcane varieties, attempts have been made to find the effectiveness of augmented block designs and completely randomized block designs in test families and control checks where the results reveal that Augmented Block Design is 11.86 times more efficient than a Randomised Block Design. In the conclusion of this study we have shown that Augmented Block Design is better suited when the plots are limited and Randomized Complete Block Design is better suited when treatments are many.

Keywords: Augmented Block Design, Balanced incomplete block design, Randomized complete Block Design, Latin Square, Unreduced BIB Design.