Decades of documented successful pieces of evidence in agritech have shown us a clear picture of the importance of biotechnology in crop improvement. The production in agriculture should have steady growth and to achieve these objective conventional methods should go on parallel with biotechnological approaches. Genetic engineering which has revolutionized the path of crop improvement involves the identification and transfer of novel genes into the existing elite cultivars. Different methods of transferring the gene into plant cells have been developed and continuous efforts have been made to increase its efficiency. Both direct and indirect method of gene transfer has its own merits and demerits. Efforts have been made continuously to eliminate drawbacks and to develop an easy, elite and eco-friendly method to transfer genes. The transformation method which is a base of genetic engineering is vital and Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer and gene gun have shown to be doing well in recent years. As a whole the methodology involved, merits and demerits of different methods have been briefly discussed.
Sorghum is a universal crop grown for its diversified end uses. A total of 250 plants of F 2 generation were evaluated for nine quantitative characters of cross made between Paiyur 2 and Kottathur local 5. The minimum difference was observed between the phenotypic coefficient of variation and genotypic coefficient of variation for all the traits which reveals that the effect of environment was minimum on the expression of the character. High PCV was observed for plant height (20.36%), test weight (23.59%), and single plant yield (44.52%). Low PCV was observed for days to fifty percent flowering (9.80%), days to maturity (6.54%) and number of leaves (7.14%). High heritability accompanied with genetic advance was observed for plant height (h 2 =99.03%; GAPM=41.55%), leaf length (h 2 =97.87%; GAPM=23.70%), stem diameter (h 2 =94.49%; GAPM=27.36%), test weight (h 2 =99.03%; GAPM=48.13%), and single plant yield (h 2 =99.57%; GAPM=91.33%) and it indicates that the characters are under the additive gene action and suitable for the selection process. Plant height (0.6115) recorded positive significant correlation with single plant yield and hence selection towards the plant height directly improves the yield. Plant height (0.6132) and test weight (0.297) showed positive direct effect on single plant yield which indicates that the selection towards these characters will improve the yield.
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