STUDIES ON GENETIC VARIABILITY PARAMETERS, CHARACTER ASSOCIATION AND PATH ANALYSIS AMONG YIELD AND YIELD CONTRIBUTING TRAITS IN PAPAYA [CARICA PAPAYA (L.)]

Abstract

An investigation was carried out to study the genetic variability, association among the yield component traits, their direct and indirect effects on the yield. All the genotypes showed considerable amount of variation in their mean performances with respect to the characters studied except TSS (0.267) indicates presence of sufficient variability for breeding of superior desirable genotypes. High heritability with high genetic advance as per cent mean recorded for characters seeds per fruit (98.3, 148.75), pulp to seed ratio (79.70, 91.47), yield per plant (83.5, 37.64), fruit length (84.5, 34.04), distance of first fruiting node from ground level (78.0, 31.66), fruits per plant (71.8, 24.18), fruit cavity, fruit diameter and average fruit weight indicating that these traits are predominantly governed by additive gene action. Yield per plant exhibited highly significant positive correlation with fruit cavity (0.88, 0.68), number of fruits per plant (0.87, 0.85), average fruit weight (0.77, 0.67) and pulp thickness (0.63, 0.54) at both genotypic and phenotypic levels respectively, indicating improvement in these traits will increase the fruit yield. Number of fruits per plant had the highest direct effect (0.97) on yield per plant followed by average fruit weight (0.56), length of fruit (0.19) indicating importance of these characters and which can be strategically used to improve the yield of papaya.