Breeding potential of selected crosses for genetic improvement of finger millet

Often, a plant breeder/researcher is confronted with thetask of handling segregating populations derived from alarge number of crosses. Early elimination of poor crosseshelps in efficient utilization of land, time and humanresources and allows handling of reasonably largesegregating populations derived from a few promisingcrosses. Under this premise, an investigation was carriedout at the experimental fields of University of AgriculturalSciences (UAS), GKVK campus, Bangalore, India during1998–2000 to assess the utility of general combiningability (gca) of selected parents for making crosses thatare likely to result in superior recombinant inbred lines(RILs) in advanced generations. Two crosses whoseparents differed for their combining ability were comparedwith the cross whose parents were similar for theircombining ability for their likely productivity in isolatingsuperior recombinant lines. The results revealed that thecrosses involving at least one of their parents with highgca effects are productive for deriving RILs with desiredtraits and desired mean expression. The mean andvariance of early segregating generation serve as usefulguidelines for predicting the breeding potential of crosses.