Genetic Behavior of some Agronomic Traits in Three Bread Wheat Crosses Using Five Population Model

The current research was performed at El-Gemmeiza Agricultural Research Station, ARC during 2015/16 to 2018/19 growing seasons, to investigate the mode of gene action and the inheritance pattern of plant height, No. of spikes plant-1, spike length, No. of kernels spike-1, 100-kernel weight and grain yield plant-1 in three crosses of bread wheat, namely Gemmeiza 11 x Sakha 94, Gemmeiza 9 x Sakha 94 and Line 1 x Giza 168. The t-test showed a highly significant differences among parental genotypes of each cross for most studied traits. The obtained findings reported that additive, dominance and epistasis effects were important in the inheritance of the studied traits. The average degree of dominance proved that partial dominance was effective for controlling most of all studied traits with the exception of plant height in the 1st cross, 100-kernel weight in the 2nd cross and grain yield plant-1 in both 1st and 3rd crosses which exhibited over-dominance gene effects. The heritability in both broad and narrow senses were moderate to high for most traits under the study except No. of kernels spike-1 and 100-kernels weight in the 2nd cross and grain yield plant-1 in the 3rd cross which showed low heritability narrow sense values. The values of expected genetic advance (∆g) were found to be correlated with heritability in narrow sense for most of studied crosses. Based on these results, crosses under this study would be of concern to wheat breeding program for genetic yield advancement with delaying the selection to later segregating generations.