Determination of Combining Ability in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

A 5×5 direct-crosses of Chickpea geneotypes (CM-98, Noor-91, Brittle-98, Punjab-2000 and Karak-1) were undertaken at Research area of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, FAS&T, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Pakistan. Then Model-I and Model-II of Griffing approach (1956) of half-diallel was used for combining ability analysis. The results pertaining to menas of all traits relative to general and specific combining ability were found highly significant (P≤ 0.01) which evidenced presence of ample differences among studied geneotypes. However, variance showed by specific combining ability for traits like fibre content, free extract (N.F.E.), protein content, fat, ash and nitrogen content, moisture content, plant height and biomass per plant as compared to general combining ability. These results are suggestive of predominantly under the control of non-additive gene action. On the other hand, the magnitude of variance resulted from GCA was higher than from SCA for pods per plant, 100-seed weight and grain yield that showed that additive genetic effects were important for them.