| P  Sumathi * and V Muralidharan
				    
				     Centre for Plant  breeding and Genetics, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore-641003, India 
				    Abstrsact 
				    A field experiment was conducted  with five sesame genotypes, two branched, TMV 4 and TMV 5, and three monostemed  / shybranched KS 990837, KS 990813 KS 9908513 and six cross  combinations of branched x monostemed to develop F1, F2,  BC1 and BC2 populations. Six generations P1,  P2, F1, F2, BC1 and BC2 were  raised in a non replicated trial to estimate the gene effects for branching and  some other yield attributing characteristics. The additive, dominance and  duplicate dominance gene effects were found to be important for number of  branches per plant. Additive  component was significantly positive for days to first flowering, days to  maturity and plant height in TMV 4 x KS 99037; plant height and number of  branches in TMV 5 x KS 990813; days to first flowering and days to maturity in  the cross TMV 5 x KS 99153; indicating the presence of additive gene action.  Additiive x additive fixable gene interaction was also reported in different  crosses. In most of the crosses, duplicate epistasis was found to be  predominant when compared to complementary epistasis. Thus gene effects for a  given characteristics varied among crosses. Inheritance study using five  crosses viz., TMV 4 x KS 99037, TMV 4 x KS 990813,   TMV 5 x    KS 99037, TMV 5 x KS990813 and TMV 5 x KS99153, showed a monogenic  inheritance of 3:1 with simple dominance recessive relationship for branching  and monostem / shy branching characteristic, respectively. The cross TMV4 x KS  99153 which showed 15:1 ratio, fitted to the expected ratio of 3:1 for  branching : shybranching respectively of the test cross progenies. This  cross also showed duplicate epistasis for the number of branches per plant in  generation mean analysis.				     
				    Key  words:Sesame, Monostem/shy branching, Gene action, Inheritance  and epistasis 
		          Full Text : pdf (766 kb) 
		          * - Corresponding Author  
		           |