Tomato is one of the most important, popular and widely grown vegetable in the world. It belongs to family Solanaceae and originated in Central and South America. It is the world’s largest vegetable crop after potato but tops the list of processed vegetables. Fresh fruits of tomato are in greater demand round the year and throughout the country. Large quantities of tomatoes are used to produce ketchup, paste, puree, juice and soup. This crop is playing an important role in economic upliftment of the farmers living in hills in the form of off-season produce in Himachal Pradesh. Tomato produced in Himachal Pradesh during June to November becomes offseason vegetable in the markets of north Indian plains fetching very remunerative price to the farmers. The national average fruit yield of tomato is less compared to other countries like Japan. Thus there is scope for its improvement which can be achieved through breeding high yielding varieties and hybrids with improved cultivation technology. Tomato a self pollinated crop and has a tremendous potential for heterosis breeding. The commercial exploitation of hybrid vigour in tomato has received greater importance on account of several advantages of hybrids over pure line varieties with response to marketable fruit yield and its component traits. For exploitation of heterosis, choice of parents is of paramount importance. Combining ability studies are more reliable as they provide useful information for the selection of parents in terms of performance of the hybrids and elucidate the nature and magnitude of various types of gene actions involved in the expression of quantitative traits. The information obtained from general combining ability of parents and specific combining ability of crosses helps us to select suitable parents and related cross combinations, respectively. The line x tester approach given by Kempthorne (1957) is one of the most appropriate approaches in preliminary screening of the material for combining ability, also it is an important technique used to understand the genetic potential of parents and their hybrids. The lines thus selected could be used in hybridization programme for developing superior F 1 hybrids. Thus, the present study was undertaken to generate information for identification of good general and specific combiners for the improvement of desirable horticultural traits.
Publish Year: 2012
