Genetic Evaluation of Earliness and Spineless Safflower Mutant Lines for Quantitative and Oil Content Criteria

Abstract

This investigation was carried out at experimental and research Farm, Faculty of Agriculture, Zagazig University, Egypt during six winter seasons . The aim of this study is to evaluate earliness and spineless mutant lines of safflower. The morphological traits (earliness, number of days to maturity) were recorded for two lines of safflower, line III and line VI and their promising mutant lines. The results confirmed the stability of 8 promising mutant lines for line III, (4, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 17, 18) and 6 promising mutant lines for line VI, (1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 7). In the M10 generation, 9 criteria were recorded, 1plant height (cm), 2-number of branches per plant, 3-number of capitula per plant, 4-number of seeds per capitulam,5-number of seeds per plant, 6-100 seed weight (g), 7-seed weight/plant (g), 8-days to maturity, 9-oil (%). High broad sense heritability (h²) of No. of capitula per plant, 100-seed weight, seed weight per plant, days to maturity and oil content were 79.16%, 77.95%, 94.91%, 79.23% and 69.41%, respectively among line III and their mutant lines. The present study confirmed that the relationship between characters under study varied between genotypes for example, oil content slightly negative correlated with seed weight per plant and was different among genotypes (-0.2495, -0.0678 and -0.2358) for line III and line VI and for over all genotypes, respectively. These results confirmed that selection of oil content and seed weight per plant could be achieved in line VI and their mutants (-0.0678). In addition, highly positive correlation between seed weight per plant and each of No. of capitula per plant and No. of seeds per plant at line VI, was observed. These results showed the simple heritable system of days to maturity, than the spineless criteria. These promising mutant lines had 168 and 170 days to maturity of line 4 and 7 from line III and 177 and 182 days of line 2 and 5 from line VI by comparison to 180 and 188 days for control of line III and line VI, respectively. These results suggest the improvement possibility of new Egyptian varieties for cultivation of harsh and poor land desert.