No abstract

C OMMON bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is one of the most important vegetable crops grown in Egypt. This study was conducted to determine the phenotypic, genotypic, and environmental correlations between seed yield and some of its traits, and to perform path analysis to assess the direct and indirect effects between seed yield per plant as dependent variable and the other traits as explanatory variables.Twenty-seven accessions of common bean were evaluated at El-Dalgamon village, El-Gharbia Governorate, Egypt during the two successive summer seasons of 2016 and 2017 using a randomized complete block design with three replications.The results revealed the importance of genotypic correlations coefficients compared to the corresponding values of phenotypic ones. The genotypic correlations were positive ranging from 0.60 to 0.99 for the correlation between seed yield per plant and each of plant height, number of leaves per plant, number of days to flowering, number of racemes per plant, number of days to maturity, number of pods per plant, and number of seeds per pod. Genotypic path analysis indicated the importance of positive direct effects of plant height, number of pods per plant, number of days to maturity, and number of seeds per pod, suggesting the direct selection of these traits to improve seed yield. Whereas, number of leaves per plant, number of days to flowering, or number of racemes per plant should be selected simultaneously with plant height or number of pods per plant since they had high positive indirect effects on seed yield through these two traits.