Abstract

An experiment was conducted during 2009–11 at Agricultural Botany Section, College of Agriculture, Nagpur to analyse the combining ability of the available genotypes with drought tolerant donors and identifying superior crosses for their exploitation in developing drought tolerant varieties of mustard. Thirty crosses obtained by crossing two testers (drought tolerant donors) with 15 lines along with their parents were evaluated in randomized complete block design replicated twice at the Agricultural Botany Section, College of Agriculture, Nagpur. Observations on days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height, number of branches/plant, number of siliquae/plant and yield/plant were recorded on five competitive randomly selected plants. Variation among the genotypes was highly significant for all the characters studied except days to maturity, thereby indicating a substantial amount of genetic variability. The significance of parents vs. crosses noticed for days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height, number of branches/plant, number of siliquae/plant and seed yield/plant satisfied the basic pre-requisite for comparing the expression of parents and crosses for different characters. Per se performance revealed the superiority of the parents GM-6, Bio-902, Seeta and ACN-9, for seed yield/plant and number of siliquae/plant. Among the crosses, GM-6 x Geeta, Ashirvad x RH-819, Sej-2 x Geeta and Seeta x Geeta exhibited superiority for seed yield/plant and number of siliquae/plant. Significant variation among lines was observed for most of the characters like days to 50% flowering, plant height, number of siliquae/plant, 1000-seed weight and seed yield/plant and also for line x tester interaction but except days to 50% flowering which allowed the estimation of general combining ability and specific combining ability effects for the above characters. While mean squares for testers were significant only for number of siliquae/plant. The parents Urvashi, JD-6 and Vardhan were identified as good general combiners. The crosses Sej-2 x Geeta and Ashirvad x RH-819 were identified as promising crosses based on mean and sea effects for yield and number of siliquae/plant which were identified for forwarding to next generation for making improvement in the seed yield along with drought tolerance by following simple selection method.