Heritability studies of yield and yield associated traits in bread wheat

Heritability studies provide valid information about the traits that are transmitted from parents to offspring and also to the successive generations. Such studies help plant breeders to predict a successful cross with high heritability transmission to the progeny and thus are useful in the incorporation of characters into the offspring. Heritability study was conducted in F5 segregating generation of a cross between HT5 (female) and HT 37 (male) of bread wheat. The genetic parameters calculated were genetic variance (Vg,), environmental variance (Ve) and heritability percentage in broad sense (h2%), genetic advance (GA) and heritability coefficient (H). The highest heritability was observed for spike length (79.3%), number of grains per spike (54.5%) and main spike yield (69.5%) associated with high genetic advance (2.8, 22.8 and 1.5 respectively). Moderate to high heritability were recorded for peduncle length (48.75%) and number of grains per spikelet (47.2%) which associated with high genetic advance (2.3 and 0.68 respectively). However awn length and plant height had shown acceptable heritability values. The present finding suggests that most of the yield associated traits have been successfully transmitted. The information generated will be helpful for better understanding and selection of suitable, desirable material especially in advance generations.