Inheritance of chickpea productivity under the conditions of the southern forest-steppe of Western Siberia

The study of the genetic regularities of the variability of the quantitative traits proves the possibility of selecting hybrids with a new, more favorable combination of them, which are of practical interest for breeding. The main goal of the research was to determine the coefficients of heritability of the mass of seeds and number of pods per plant in hybrid combinations of chickpea, which allows establishing the potential of the parental varieties in transferring valuable genes responsible for the plant productivity to offspring and expanding the spectrum of plant genetic diversity. The experiments were carried out on the fields of the educational and experimental farm of Omsk State Agrarian University in the southern forest-steppe of the Omsk Region in 2016-2018. The studies included 6 chickpea samples with a complex of valuable traits obtained from the Federal Research Center of the All-Russian Institute of Plant Industry named after N.I. Vavilov (VIR, St. Petersburg) and 8 hybrid combinations obtained on their basis. As a result of the carried out studies, it was found that the mass of seeds per plant was characterized by low heritability (H2 = 22.8%), the number of pods per plant by a high one (H2 = 54.0%). The variability of the mass of seeds per plant is largely paratypical and is influenced by environmental conditions; the variability in the number of pods per plant is due to genetic factors and indicates a high genetic diversity in the studied splitting chickpea populations. Selection based on the number of pods per plant will be highly effective already in the early generations of hybrids. If based on the mass of seeds per plant, selection will be ineffective; it should be carried out in later hybrid generations under favorable growing conditions. The selection of valuable genotypes is most successful in the following hybrid chickpea populations: according to the seed weight per plant - C-35 x ILC-2394, C-80 x ILC-2394, C-27 x ILC-2394; according to the number of pods per plant - C-27 x ILC-2394, C-27 x ILC-2402.