Identification of Best General and Specific Combiners for Soybean Improvement

The present study on general combining ability effects and specific combining ability effects involves 15 parents viz., lines RKS 18, RKS 113, AUKS 199, AUKS 200, AUKS 212, RVSM 2011-35, JS 20-98, AUKS 202, AUKS 208, AUKS 218, JS 21-72, NRC 165 and tester JS 20-34, NRC 138, SL 958 with their 36 F1 hybrid through Line x Tester mating system. The present investigation was undertaken using Randomized Block Design with three replications. The combining ability effects were estimated for thirteen characters viz., days to 50% flowering, days to maturity, plant height, number of branches per plant, number of pods per plant, pod length, number of seeds per pod, 100-Seed weight, seed yield per plant, biological yield per plant, harvest index, protein content and oil content. The result showed that gca effects of parents and sca effects of hybrids were significant differed. Among the parents, AUKS 212 was found to be good general combiner based on the per se performance and gca effects for seed yield and other contributing traits and four hybrids AUKS 113 x SL 958, RVSM 2011-35 x NRC 138, AUKS 199 x JS 20-34 and NRC 165 x JS 20-34 were superior high sca effects for seed yield and yield contributing traits. These crosses can be utilized in future breeding programmes and exploitation of better segregants through pedigree method or single seed descent method in advance generations for improvement of yield and yield attributes coupled with quality traits sound soybean genotypes.