Role of female parent in the inheritance of brix in early selection stages of sugarcane

Abstract

Breeding for high levels of sugar yield requires basic information on the mode of inheritance of brix in seedling population derived from parental clones differing in sucrose content. The research aimed to examine the role of female parent in the inheritance of brix in early stages of sucrose accumulation. One thousand eight hundred and ninety seedlings derived from thirty biparental crosses involving 20 Indian commercial hybrids and five Foreign hybrids were studied. Brix measurement on the parent clones and seedlings were taken during October (8 months), December (10 months) and February (12 months). The heritability of brix estimated from the regression of offspring on the midparent was 0.63 in the month of October, 0.60 in December and 0.52 in February with a highly significant regression mean squares. Selection for high brix is therefore effective in early stages of Sugarcane. A large proportion of the seedling population recorded high brix value when clones such as CoC 671, Co 85002 and Co 86002 were used as the female parent. Among the foreign hybrids, Puerto Rico clones viz., PR 1068 and PR 1095 gave more number of high quality progenies when used as female. The results of the present study indicated the potential to generate high quality progenies when high sucrose parent clones were used as female instead of male.