Unravelling the Genetic Variability for Yield Attributed Traits to Identify the Superior and High Yielding Genotypes in Black Gram (Vigna mungo L. Hepper)

Abstract

Black gram is one of the important summer pulse crops of many south Asian countries viz., India, Bangladesh, Korea, Thailand, and Pakistan. Also, Black gram served as a good protein, especially in the form of lysine which is lacking in the other pulse crops. The study of the variance of many quantitative traits paves a way to identify better genotypes concerning our needs. Nowadays, improving the yield is the foremost thing in concern of food security, which requires a stringent procedure and data analysis to identify the superior genotypes processing high-yielding characteristics. Hence an investigation was conducted on 12 black gram genotypes to gain an insight into the existing pattern of variability for quantitative traits to find out the high-yielding superior genotypes. The analysis of variance revealed that all the genotypes differed significantly among themselves for all the characters. The phenotypic coefficient of variation value was found to be higher than the genotypic coefficient of variation for all ten characters. The traits viz., number of seeds per pod, number of pods per plant, and pod length recorded moderate estimates of genotypic coefficient of variation. Pod length (91.74%) recorded the highest heritability followed by single plant yield (88.10%), number of pods per plant (76.17%), days to 50% flowering (71.73%) and number of seeds per pod (62.61%). Moderate heritability was observed for plant height (57.38%), hundred seed weight (50.05%), number of clusters per plant (49.22%), number of branches per plant (43.39%), and days to maturity (40.77%). Hence these characters could be given importance during the selection program for developing high-yielding varieties.