Characterization of chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) germplasm for quantitative and qualitative characters (2004)

Abstract

A field experiment was conducted during kharif 2002 at Division of Vegetable Crops, Indian Institute of horticultural research, Hessaraghatta Bangalore to “Characterize the Chilli (Capsicum annuum L.) germplasm for quantitative and qualitative characters. The design adopted was Augmented design with four standard checks viz., Arka Lohit, Pusa Jwala, G-4 and Punjab Lal. Two hundred accessions were evaluated for their variability. Phenotypic coefficient of variability was found to be higher magnitude than the genotypic coefficient of variability for all the seventeen character studied. High percentage of PCV coupled with thigh heritability and high genetic advance was observed for number of fruits per plant, fruit length, fruit width, fruit pericarp thickness, Ascorbic acid, capsaicin, capsanthin, oleoresin, fresh to dry recovery, fresh yield per plant and dry yield per plant. Correlation analysis revealed that positive significant association of fresh fruit yield per plant with number of fruits per plant (0.907,0.921), plant spread (0.443, 0.455), ascorbic acid (0.358, 0.365), plant height (0.316,0.328), oleoresin (0.237, 0.242), number of seeds per fruit (0.185, 0.1990 and capsanthin (0.183, 0.185). Path coefficient analysis for fresh fruit yield per plant indicated that number of fruits per plant (0.861), fruit length (0.175), capsanthin (0.084), fruit width (0.066) and pericarp thickness (0.0.49) are the most important characters, which can be used as selection criteria for improving yield. No parallelism was observed between genetic diversity and geographical diversity. The characters ranking indicated that, fresh fruit yield per plant followed by ascorbic acid, number of fruits per plant and capsanthin were the major contributors towards genetic divergence. None of the combinations of selection indices constituted for fresh fruit yield per plant recorded more than 100 per cent relative efficiency, which revealed that straight selection was superior to selection indices for this character.