Artemisia annua is an important medicinal crop used for the production of the anti-malarial compound artemisinin. In order to assist in the production of affordable high quality artemisinin we have carried out an A. annua breeding programme aimed at improving artemisinin concentration and biomass. Here we report on a combining ability analysis of a diallel cross to identify robust parental line...

To evaluate superior hybrid combinations, biometric techniques based on the quantification of heterosis as in the diallel analyses and predictive procedures are commonly being used. Diallel analyses have the disadvantage of requiring the evaluation of each parent in all possible combinations, which may be impossible in the case of studies involving many parents. The predictive methods which dis...

A diallel cross is a set of all possible matings between several genotypes, which may be individuals, clones, homozygous lines, etc. Such crosses are used to estimate general and specific combining abilities of lines and crosses respectively. For ‘n’ inbreed lines, the possible F1’s are n(n–1)/2, which are to be tested in a suitably replicated randomized design. With facilities available for te...

Aflatoxins, produced by the fungus Aspergillus flavus, occur naturally in maize. Contamination of maize grain with aflatoxin is a major food and feed safety problem and greatly reduces the value of the grain. Plant resistance is generally considered a highly desirable approach to reduction or elimination of aflatoxin in maize grain. In this investigation, a diallel cross was produced by crossin...

The robustness of universal optimal binary balanced block (BBB) designs for diallel crosses has been investigated for the loss of any t (~1) observations (crosses) in a single block as per connectedness and A-efficiency criteria. It is observed that all the BBB designs for diallel crosses with the minimum eigenvalue strictly greater than 2 are robust as per connectedness criterion. Further A-ef...

in order to study the mode of genetic control and heritability of morphological characteristics important for the improvement of root weight, sugar yield and white sugar yield in tropical beet, griffing's diallel cross method along with the biplot display of diallel data were applied. nine sugar beet lines including 7112-36, 7173, 474, 452, 261, 436-104, sb-firoz, rr607 and 436 were crosse...

Four advanced breeding lines of wheat which had appeared to be resistant to stripe rust in the past years along with a susceptible variety, Bolani, were intercrossed in all combinations of a half-diallel design. Seedlings were grown in greenhouse until the first leaves fully expanded and then inoculated with two pathotypes (races) 6E134A+ and 134E148A+, separately. Days to the first pustule eru...