General and Specific Combining Ability for Nine Morphologic Characters in Round Brinjal (Solanum melongena L.)

A study was undertaken to estimate general and specific combining in brinjal through diallel analysis involving 6 parents. The combining ability analysis revealed highly significant differences among the treatments for all the parameters studied except days to 50% flowering and number of primary branches per plant. The genotype SBRB-6/12 was found best general combiner for number of fruit per plant and yield per plant. The top three crosses (SBRB-3/12 x SBRB-2/12, SBRB-6/12 x SBRB-3/12 and KS-224 x Swarna Mani) with high per se performance have exhibited high sca effects for yield. Both additive and non-additive gene actions were operating for all the characters except days to 50% flowering, fruit diameter and number of primary branches/plant. Therefore, the general combiner can be exploited for the creation of varieties lines, and the presence of specific combining in the hybrids.