Studies on Isolation of Superior Clones in Four Species of Fodder Grasses

Abstract

The natural variation in fodder grasses provides a wealth of material for studying the nature and origin of such variations, based on which effective breeding programmes can be formulated. The importance of species like Cenchrus ciliaris, Chloris gayana, Brachiaria mutica and species of Setaria in augmenting the fodder resources has been well recognised (Libenberg, 1950; Sample, 1951; White 1957). Cytomorphological investigations on clones of Cenchrus ciliaris and C. setigerus indicated the polymorphic nature of both species and occurrence of intra-specific chromosomal forms (Patel et al., 1961; Ponnaiya et al., 1965; Ramaswamy et al., 1969; Ramaswamy and Raman, 1969) Diploid and tetraploid races of C. gayana are known to occur (Darlington and Wylie, 1955). No numerical variation in chromosomes was present in the clones of B. mutica and species of Setaria investigated upon. Selection of strains from the point of view of fodder develop-ment can be successful in view of the variability of the population and maintenance of constancy in the behaviour of progenies due to apomictic reproduction (Atwood, 1947; Carnhan and Helen, 1961; Raman, 1966). The results of yield trials conducted with clones of the four species of fodder grasses mentioned above for evolving high yielding genotypes are summarised below.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.197251

Pages

31 - 38

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

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