Abstract:The present study was undertaken on bottle gourd in a 10 x 10 diallel cross excluding reciprocal. The 45 F
1 hybrid along with their ten parent were sown in RBD with three replication at the Main Experiment Station (MES), Department of Vegetable Science, N.D. University of Agriculture & Technology, Narendra Nagar (Kumarganj), Ayodhya (U.P.) India to study the general and specific combing ability during Zaid 2017 (E
1) and 2018 (E
2). The selected parental lines are Pusa Naveen (P
1), NDBG-601 (P
2), PBOG-3 (P
3), NDBG-517 (P
4)
, NDBG-603 (P
5), NDBG-624 (P
6), N. Pooja (P
7), NDBG-100 (P
8), Punjab Komal (P
9), and NDBG-11 (P
10) were crossed in the all possible combinations, excluding reciprocals. For
this experiment observations were recorded for 18 metric traits viz. days to first staminate and pistillate flower appearance, node number to first staminate and pistillate flower anthesis, days to first fruit harvest, primary branches per plant, vine length (m), fruit length (cm), fruit circumference (cm), T.S.S. (⁰B), ascorbic acid (mg per 100 g fresh weight), reducing sugar, non-reducing sugar and total sugars (%),dry matter content, Fruit weight (kg), number of fruits per plant, fruit yield per plant (kg).
Highly significant variances over seasons were observed for general combining ability and specific combining ability for all the eighteen characters studied during both the seasons and pooled suggested that both additive and non-additive gene actions were very important in the expression of all the characters. Crosses viz., P1 x P2, P3 x P6, P4 x P9 and P5 x P6 reflected highly significant specific combining ability effect for fruit yield per plant during both the seasons and over seasons (pooled).