ELUCIDATION OF INDIGENOUS WHEAT BREEDING LINES FOR GRAIN YILED AND YIELD RELATED TRAITS

Improving grain yield is the principal objective of wheat breeding program for its commercial cultivation. Therefore, in the presented study, we evaluated 100 indigenous wheat genotypes including three commercial checks for seed yield and some potential yield related parameters. Results indicated significant difference among studied wheat breeding lines for plant height, heading days, maturity days, and length of spike, peduncle length, tillers meter-2, spikelets/spike, and number of grains spike-1, 1000-grain weight and grain yield plot-1. Wheat genotype UCA-95 gained maximum 1000-grain weight i.e. 48.41 g in minimum maturity days (136.50). Similarly, maximum plant height (97.91 cm), tillers m-2 (403.00), spike length (14.85 cm), number of grains spike-1 (62.32) and grain yield plot-1 (2033.5 g) were recorded for UCA-77, UCA-67, UCA-88, UCA-42 and UCA-14, respectively. These breeding lines proved better grain yielder than commercial checks. Furthermore, high heritability (BS) and high genetic advance values were found for tillers m-2 and grain yield plot-1 which revealed that these two parameters were potential traits for seed yield improvement in studied wheat breeding lines. Inter-relationship among potential traits revealed that grain yield plot-1 exhibited positive genetic association with peduncle length, plant height and spikelet/spike. Thus, it is suggested that wheat accessions which showed better performance than checks should be promoted for varietal development procedures and potential traits having positively significant relationship with wheat grain yield should be used in wheat breeding program.