Combining Ability and Heterosis in Snake Gourd (Trichosanthes cucumerina L.)

Abstract

The present investigation was carried out with 36 hybrids and they were evaluated for growth, quality, mosaic disease incidence and yield through line x tester method to identify combinations expressing high hybrid vigour in snake gourd. The significant variation in gca, sca and heterosis over the standard variety were noticed for all the traits. The line IC 308557 (L4 ), IC 284753 (L5 ), IC 546083 (L6 ) and the testers Jeyamkondam Local (T2 ) and Kulithalai Local (T1 ) were found to be best general combiners for growth, quality, mosaic disease incidence and yield characters. Among the hybrids L2 xT3 , L7 xT2 , L2 xT4 , L5 xT1 and L8 xT4 were found to be the good specific combiners (gca) for most of the characters viz., growth, ascorbic acid, mosaic disease incidence and yield per vine. Among the 36 hybrids, seven viz., IC333314 x Kumbakonam Local (L2 xT3 ), IC433526 x Kulithalai Local (L3 xT1 ), IC546083 x Kulithalai Local (L6 xT1 ), IC546083 x Kumbakonam Local (L6 xT3 ), IC433526 x Kumbakonam Local (L3 xT3 ), IC284753 x Kulithalai Local (L5 xT1 ) and IC410160 x Jeyamkondam Local (L7 xT2 ) exhibited highly significant positive standard heterosis for growth, quality, mosaic disease incidence and yield. These seven hybrids were found to be suitable for exploiting heterosis.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.10.201801

Pages

410 - 414

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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