Vol. 10, Issue 11 (2021)

Author(s):
Sameena Lone, K Hussain, Ajaz Malik, Khalid Z Masoodi, S Narayan, ZA Dar, Gowher Ali, Syed Mazahir Hussain and Majid Rashid

Abstract:
Heterosis breeding is mainly used to improve quality of cherry tomato because traditional methods cannot be used to achieve this goal. A half diallel design was used to estimate the magnitude of heterosis for yield and its attributing traits in cherry tomato. Fifty-seven treatments comprising of 45 F₁’s, 10 parents and 2 checks were evaluated for various yield and its component traits at Vegetable Experimental Farm, Division of Vegetable Science, SKUAST-Kashmir, Shalimar during the Kharif season, 2019 in Augmented Block Design. The maximum heterosis over standard checks was exhibited by the cross Sun Cherry x VRT-02 in E₁ and cross WIR-5032 x VRT-02 in E₂ for ascorbic acid content and cross EC-914092 x EC-914097 in E₁ and cross EC-914115 x EC-520078 in E₂ for lycopene content. Hence, these crosses exhibited commercial potential to replace the checks after further testing.