Search

The use of Solanum aethiopicum as the female parent with S. melongena led to the development of a cytoplasmic-genic male sterility system (CGMS) in eggplant. The male sterility was complete and expressed as rudimentary anthers with no pollen grains. Ten backcross progenies of male sterile lines in diverse genetic backgrounds of S. melongena were characterised after BC7 generation for 14 horticultural traits. It was observed that male sterile lines and their respective maintainer parents were isogenic for all the traits, except stamen size and days to 50% flowering. The fertility of male sterile lines was restored after hybridising with plants derived from an S. melongena × S. aethiopicum cross. The fertility restoration was governed by a single dominant gene. The maternal cytoplasm of S. aethiopicum in male sterile lines and of S. melongena in maintainers and restorers was confirmed with mitochondria and chloroplast DNA-specific molecular markers. Further, to assess the heterotic potential, 10 cytoplasmic male sterility lines were crossed with three restorers to develop 30 F1 hybrids, out of which D−67A × R−6 and D−104A × R−6 were found consistently better than the standard check for yield plant−1 over two years. In this manuscript a comprehensive study on development and utilisation of an alloplasmic CGMS system in eggplant has been discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In present investigation, 110 locally developed genotypes from different breeding programmes in brinjal were classified into eleven clusters on the basis of their D² values computed from Mahalanobis D² statistics of twelve morphological traits, wherein interand intra-cluster distances highlighted the genetic divergence of the genotypes grouped among and within different clusters. Among all, fourth cluster was the largest with 33 genotypes; however, each of second, fifth, ninth, tenth and eleventh clusters contained only single genotype. The genotypes of eighth and tenth clusters were highly diverse (1584.40) followed by third and eighth (1431.31), eighth and ninth (1302.69), sixth and eighth (1126.33) and first and eighth (1042.91) clusters. Intra-cluster (within cluster) variation was the highest in seventh cluster (74.43) followed by eighth (61.20) and sixth (54.36) that described the diverse nature of eighteen, five and nineteen genotypes in these groups, respectively. However, PBL-268, PBGL-401, PBL-243, PSR 308 and PBOB-518 were grouped individually in IInd, Vth, IXth, Xth and XIth clusters, respectively. Overall, fifth cluster had most vigorous and high yielding ((2.82 kg/plant) genotype (PBGL-405); eighth cluster included genotypes with big round fruits and maximum fruit weight (317.43g); and tenth cluster had the earliest genotype (PSR-308) with the maximum number of fruits per plant (43.17). Out of twelve morphological traits, 94.19% diversity was brought by average fruit weight (67.86%), number of fruits per plant (17.26%), fruit yield per plant (5.37%) and fruit breadth (3.70%), however, other traits had negligible share towards the variation. This study created the foundation for future hybridization programmes in brinjal, where the parents can be selected on the basis of highly diverse groups as well as traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]