Efficiency of Simple Recurrent Selection and Selfing with Selection on Improving Growth, Yield and Quality of Pumpkin (Cucurbita Moschata)

Abstract

It is important to give a good consideration towards the establishment of effective breeding programs for pumpkin purification and improvement. This study was carried out during three successive summer seasons of 2013 till 2015 to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of one cycle of simple recurrent selection and selfing with selection for two generations, as two breeding methods, to improve some important characters of pumpkin cultivar 'Balady'. Eight derived genetic populations; i. e, original population (C0), one cycle of simple recurrent selection (C1) and six selected progenies from selfing with selection for two generations (S2-1, S2-2, S2-3, S2-4, S2-5 and S2-6) were evaluated for vegetative, flowering, yield components and fruit quality characters. The results of the estimated values of coefficient of variation indicated that the original population (C0) had an extensive range of variability which ranged from 13.55% for number of days to first female flower up to 71.83% for total yield/plant. The first cycle of recurrent selection enhanced the main stem length, number of branches/plant, average fruit weight and number of fruits/plant with about 122.60%, 157.50%, 338.30 % and 243.33% respectively. Also, selfing with selection method for two generations enhanced main stem length within the range of 17.00% to 132.10 %, and number of branches per plant by 7.20% to 71.60%, average fruit weight was noticed to be within the range of 65.10% to 285.46% and number of fruits/plant was within the range of 4.00% to 191.66 % for all selected selfed progenies over that of the original population. The selected selfed progeny S2-1 and C1 gave high improvement values of total yield/plant with about 189.91% and 148.69%, respectively. The first cycle of recurrent selection was found to be apparently efficient in increasing and enhancing the general performances more than selfing with selection for two generations for most studied characters, except for number of days to first female flower and carotene content. Therefore, it may be concluded that recurrent selection seemed to be effective and efficient for developing of improved commercial pumpkin cultivar 'Balady'; whereas, selfing with selection can be successfully used to develop inbred lines for the production of hybrid or synthetic cultivar, out of the common commercial ones.