Components of genetic variation of salt tolerance in chick pea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Abstract

understanding of the genetic basis of salt tolerance is important to improve the salt tolerance of chick pea through selection and breeding. In order to achieve this goal a 6 × 6 diallel cross involving two salt‐tolerant and four moderately‐tolerant or sensitive lines of chick pea was used to study the inheritance of salt tolerance in this crop. The genetics of salt tolerance of six parents and their thirty F₁ hybrids and reciprocals was studied in sand culture at 0, or 40 mol m^‐3 NaCI following Hayman's method. The results for regression analysis showed that for 1000 seed weight the regression coefficient (b) is equal to zero so this character was not considered for further analysis, whereas number of pods/plant and number of seeds/plant partially fulfilled the assumptions as the regression coefficient was significantly different from both zero and unity for these parameters. However, for seed yield all the diallel assumptions were met as the value of b did not depart significantly from unity. Results of components of variance analyzed revealed that salt tolerance was governed by both additive and dominance gene effects with the preponderance of dominance effect for all three variables, i.e., seed yield, number of pods/plant and number of seeds/plant. Salt sensitivity was dominant over tolerance and parents found to possess excess of recessive alleles. In this set of chick pea lines the estimates of narrow‐ and broad‐sense heritabilities are very high for all three variables. The results support the possibility of selecting for salt tolerance and to obtain relatively rapid improvement in this character utilizing the available genetic variation in the gene pool of the crop.