Heritability and Combining Ability Studies in Strawberry Population

Abstract

The most efficient breeding strategies in crop improvement is the selection based on heritability and combing ability estimates for the traits of economic importance or commercial value. Therefore, the present study was to obtain estimates of heritability and to estimate the phenotypic and genotypic correlations among the characteristics of interest. The commercial cultivars ‘Aromas’, ‘Camarosa’, ‘Dover’, ‘Festival Flórida’, ‘Oso Grande’, ‘Sweet Charlie’ and ‘Milsei-Tudla’, and 103 F1 hybrids from the crossbreeding experiments were evaluated for four traits of commercial fruit yield and 13 traits of fruit physical and chemical quality. The estimated genetic parameters were general combining ability, specific combining ability, genotypic correlation among traits, estimates of heritability, genetic and phenotypic variance. The ‘Camarosa’ and ‘Aromas’ cultivars were the most promising cultivars for use as parents in the commercial fruit production, while ‘Dover’ and ‘Sweet Charlie’ cultivars were selected for taste of fruit in strawberry breeding, as they showed higher concentrations of favorable alleles in the F1 hybrid population. It was also verified some strong genetic correlations for some pairs of characteristics in the present study that may allow indirect selection. The estimation of these parameters is an important basis for decision making on the genetic engineering of strawberry.

Selection of Experimental Hybrids of Strawberry Using Multivariate Analysis

“…Yield traits also presented the highest heritability values (Table 2), corroborating the results of Vieira et al [11,30], who assessed strawberry hybrids and found values above 80% for NCF and TFM. In contrast, the authors found heritability below 60% for SS/TA ratio and TP and higher values for SS (60.17 and 67%, respectively).…”

“…No differences were found for soluble solids, titratable acidity, pH, and anthocyanins. In contrast, the physicochemical attributes differed significantly between the hybrids that were assessed by Vieira et al [30] and Camargo et al [31].…”

“…Yield traits NCF, MCF, AMCF, and TFM showed high correlations with each other (Figure 4), which was already expected, as commercial fruits are big. Thus, the higher the weight is, the higher the values of TFM and AMCF [30]. However, yield traits showed no correlation with physicochemical attributes and bioactive compounds, except for SS/TA ratio and SS, thus hindering the selection process for fresh market and processing.…”

Phytochemical Characterization of Blue Honeysuckle in Relation to the Genotypic Diversity of Lonicera sp.

“…In our research, in most cases, genotypic correlation coefficients were higher than phenotypic ones, which indicated, as reported in the example of other species of berry plants by Mishra et al [48], that the effects of environment suppressed the phenotypic relationship between these characters. Moreover, knowledge of the degree of genetic correlations between important traits had a great impact on the selection of improved genotypes in breeding programs [49,50] and enabled indirect selection. According to Connor et al [51], the total phenolic content was suitable for indirect selection for antioxidant activity in blueberry, indicating the possibility of also obtaining new blue honeysuckle genotypes with higher levels of phytochemical compounds.…”

Genotypic assessment of productivity and quality of berries of strawberry varieties

“…The issues of genotypic proximity of the studied forms of strawberries, manifested in the parallelism of variability of variation arrays of traits, considered in a number of new works on breeding and genetic topics, almost always affect the description and assessment of the hereditary economically significant potential of varieties in the light of not only continuous renewal of the assortment, but also improvement cultivation technologies [10][11][12].…”