Heterosis studies in cherry tomato for various quality traits in open and protected environment

Heterosis breeding is mainly used to improve quality of cherry tomato because traditional methods cannot be used to achieve this goal. A half diallel design was used to estimate the magnitude of heterosis for yield and its attributing traits in cherry tomato. Fifty-seven treatments comprising of 45 F1’s, 10 parents and 2 checks were evaluated for various yield and its component traits at Vegetable Experimental Farm, Division of Vegetable Science, SKUAST-Kashmir, Shalimar during the Kharif season, 2019 in Augmented Block Design. The maximum heterosis over standard checks was exhibited by the cross Sun Cherry x VRT-02 in E1 and cross WIR-5032 x VRT-02 in E2 for ascorbic acid content and cross EC-914092 x EC-914097 in E1 and cross EC-914115 x EC-520078 in E2 for lycopene content. Hence, these crosses exhibited commercial potential to replace the checks after further testing.