Authors : Martin Agyei Yeboah , Chen Xuehao , Cheng Rong Feng , Guohua Liang and Minghong Gu
Abstract: Waterlogging is one of the most important environmental stresses that severely limit crop growth and productivity. Development of tolerant cultivars is one of most cost efficient and environmentally safe method of control. The objectives of this study, was to estimate narrow-sense heritabilities of waterlogging traits and to determine phenotypic and genetic correlations between these traits in F3 progeny derived from a cross between PW0801 (susceptible) and PW0832 (tolerant) cucumber inbred lines in a green house experiment. Plants were subjected to 10 days waterlogging stress and evaluated for four waterlogging traits, Tolerance score (TOL), Adventitious Root Formation (ARF), Shoot Dry Weight (SDW) and Vine Length (VLH), however control plants were not flooded. The frequency distribution of F3 families for all the waterlogged traits showed continuous distributions. Some individual plants in the F3 families had values higher or lower than the parental means suggesting transgressive segregation. Significant genetic correlation coefficient of 0.372, 0.334 and 0.276 were estimated between TOL and SDWw, TOL and ARF and between ARF and VLHw, respectively. Both genetic (0.181) and phenotypic (0.051) correlation coefficients between TOL and VLHw were not significant at p = 0.05. The narrow sense-heritability was 26.0% for TOL, 22.6% for SDWw, 18.0% for VLHw and 12.7% for ARF. From these results, breeding schemes that would allow for higher recombination rates could be effective for the desired tolerance.
Martin Agyei Yeboah , Chen Xuehao , Cheng Rong Feng , Guohua Liang and Minghong Gu , 2008. Correlations and Heritability of Waterlogging Tolerance Traits in Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.). Plant Sciences Research, 1: 1-7.