GENETIC VARIATION AND SELECTION CRITERIA FOR SEED YIELD RELATED TRAITS IN RAPE SEED (Brassica napus L.)

The field experiment was conducted to estimate the genetic variability and correlation between yield contributing traits using 15 rape seed genotypes. The results indicated that the phenotypic variance for all the characters was considerably higher than the genotypic variance denoting little influence of environmental factors on their expression. Characters like 1000-seed weight (12.39, 14.10), days to 50% flowering (18.36, 18.77) and days to maturity (4.63, 5.06) showed low genotypic and phenotypic coefficient of variation. Moderate genotypic and phenotypic coefficient of variation was observed in number of primary branches per plant (20.22, 22.16), length of siliqua (20.84, 20.97), number of seeds per siliqua (30.90, 33.06), number of siliquae per plant (49.34, 49.81) and yield per plant (34.36, 39.98) and high genotypic (67.00) and phenotypic coefficient of variation (68.57) was observed for number of secondary branches per plant. Plant height (85.98%, 30.89), 1000 seed weight (77.14%, 22.41), days to 50 % flowering (95.66%, 20.35) and days to maturity (83.85%, 7.82) showed high heritability with low genetic advance whic