Genetic Variability and Association Analysis in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) for Seed Yield Characters

During Rabi, 2019-2020, the present trial was carried out at the field experimentation centre of the Genetics and Plant Breeding, Naini Agricultural Institute, Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Allahabad to assess genetic variability, correlation and path analysis in twenty-six chickpea genotypes, including one check variety Uday for twelve quantitative traits. The analysis of variance revealed significant variations across genotypes for all of the features under investigation, demonstrating a high level of genetic variability in the experimental material. The genotypes C-224, C-201, ICC-16693, C-1028, C-129, C-213, C-130 and C-1025 have been identified as the top performing lines among the genotypes studied. PCV values were found to be higher than GCV for all of the traits investigated, indicating that environmental variables influence the characters. The fact that biological yield per plant has a high PCV and GCV implies that there is a lot of genetic variability in the material for these qualities. Plant height, days to 50% flowering, harvest index, biological yield per plant, hundred seed weight, seed yield per plant and number of pods per plant were all found to have high heritability. For the traits of biological yield per plant, seed index, harvest index, number of pods per plant, seed yield per plant and plant height, high heritability was observed along with high genetic advance as percent of mean, indicating that these characters were primarily governed by additive gene effects. As a result of the accumulation of more additive genes, direct selection of these features using a simple selection strategy would be efficient, leading to further development of chickpea genotypes. Number of seeds per plant, number of pods per plant, biological yield per plant, number of primary branches per plant, number of secondary branches per plant and plant height all had positive significant genotypic and phenotypic associations with grain yield per plant. At the phenotypic level, biological yield per plant and number of seeds per plant both had a strong positive direct effect on grain yield per plant and contributed the most to yield per plant.