Kshitij Malhotra , Dinesh Kumar , Vidya Dhar Pandey

Abstract

Nine fruit morphological traits were studied in ten stands of Jatropha curcas sp well as at tree level. Significant differences werefound among stands for fruit length, fruit diameter, pericarp weight per fruit, seed: fruit weight ratio, kernel: fruit weight ratio and pericarp: fruit weight ratio traits while all morphological traits showed significant differences among trees within stands. The estimation of the variance components, however, revealed that the fruit traits, especially weight traits viz. fruit weight, total seed weight per fruit and total kernel weight per fruit have negligible contribution from stands and small contribution from trees.Maximum variationwas found among fruits within trees (i.e.at fruit levelorerror).Pericarp weight per fruit and fruit ratio traits (i.e. seed: fruit weight ratio, kernel: fruit weight ratio and pericarp: fruit weight ratio) were affected to small extent by stand per se. The repeatability of all fruit traits at tree level were also low to moderate (0.105 to 0.278).

Keywords

Jatropha curcas, Fruit Morphological Traits, Variance Components, Repeatability

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Kshitij Malhotra , Vidyadhar Pandey , Dinesh Kumar

Abstract

Seed germination traits i.e. germination percent, germination value and germination energy in laboratory and nursery conditions were evaluated for 97 accessions of Jatropha curcas belonging to 10 stands in Uttarakhand. On the basis of all seed germination traits tree T1 of stand S6 and tree T1 of stand S8 were best. Stand S3, which was not the best stand for germination percentage on the basis of stand level analysis, had three trees showing 86 percent laboratory germination on par with the trees having the highest germination percent (87.5%) in the study at tree level. High heritability (77%) and moderate genetic gain (21%) were recorded at stand level for germination percent at 5% selection intensity. The expression of germination traits was usually higher under laboratory than under nursery conditions. It was suggested that the collection of seeds for germination purpose should be done by taking individual tree as a unit ratherthan taking standas unit of collection.

Keywords

Jatropha Curcas, Germination, Variation, Seed Source, Heritability.

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