Abstract

                                An experiment was conducted to estimate the combining ability in mungbean in order to select good general combing parents and desirable crosses. Analysis of variance revealed that the variances due to GCA and SCA were highly significant, indicating importance of additive and non additive gene action in the inheritance of six different characters such as, plant height, number of clusters/ plant, number of pods/ cluster, number of pods/ plant, pod length and test weight. Genotype SML 382 was found to be the best general combiner for all nine characters under study and PUSA 9871 was found to be desirable parent for seven characters viz., plant height, number of primary branches/ plant, number of pods/ cluster, number of pods/ plant, number of seeds/ pod, 100-seed weight and seed yield/ plant. ML 287 and NARP 1-1 were identified as good general combiners for six characters whereas and WGG 37 identified as good general combiner for number of primary branches, number of clusters/ plant, number of pods/ cluster and number of pods/ plant. The crosses SML 382 x WGG 37, PUSA 9871 x WGG 37 and NARP 1 -1 x SML 382 showed significant SCA effects for seed yield/ plant and other yield contributing characters.

Key words : Combining ability, mungbean, GCA and SCA effects