GENETIC VARIATIONS IN YIELD AND YIELD CONTRIBUTING TRAITS OF GREEN AMARANTH

The experiment was carried out at the experimental farm of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Agricultural University (BSMRAU), Salna, Gazipur during 2015 using twenty promising genotypes (AA21 to AA40) of green amaranth in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications to study the variability, genetic parameters, association of yield related morphological traits to foliage yield and to find out the direct and indirect effects of components characters towards foliage yield. The significant analysis of variance revealed wide range of variability among the twenty genotypes of green amaranth. Except for stem diameter, foliage yield and all the yield contributing morphological traits had high heritability including high genetic advance in percent of mean, high to moderate genotypic and phenotypic variances and coefficient of variations with minimum differences of PCV and GCA indicated that the traits were governed by additive gene actions and had a great scope of selection for the improvement of green amaranth. Correlation study revealed that total biomass and shoot weight showed significant association with foliage yield per m(2). Hence, selection based on total biomass and shoot weight could remarkably improve the foliage yield of green amaranth. However, the path coefficient analysis revealed that shoot weight had the highest positive direct effect (1.19) with significant genotypic correlation on foliage yield. It indicated that direct selection based on shoot weight would be effective for the improvement of foliage yield of green amaranth. Mean performance study revealed that the genotypes, such as AA21, AA22, AA24, AA25, AA27, AA28, AA31, AA36 and AA39 had high foliage yields including most of the yield related morphological traits over the grand mean. These genotype could be selected as high yielding varieties or parental lines for future breeding program.