Correlation studies among morphological and yield-related traits in sunflower

Abstract

Abstract Pakistan is in dire need of an oil and oil-based products For this, the prime objective is to pay serious attention to oilseed crops and mainly towards sunflower because the oil is of very good quality in terms of nutrition value; also the cake can be used as feed for animals. The crop can trim the import bill of edible oil. It takes only 130 days to reach maturity with comparatively less cost and highly divined in sense of plentiful yield. Thus breeders are trying to produce good quality accessions that may also fulfil the need of quantity where climate change is also the main issue. The present research was conducted at the Raja wala farm situated near the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad during the year 2020–21. Twenty accessions of sunflower were sown in Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with three replications. From each line, five plants were tested to check the genetic variability, correlation coefficient analysis for different morphological characters and yield-related traits of sunflower. The data of quantitative traits were recorded i.e. plant height (cm), the number of leaves/plant, head diameter (cm), internodal length (cm), leaf area (cm), 100 seed weight (g), total yield per plant (%), oil content (%) and protein content (%). Analysis of variance and mean comparisons of sunflower accessions had highly significant differences for all traits. Most of the character’s ranges are comparable with the ranges found in the literature. The accession G-32 showed good performance for oil content, protein content and head diameter. So, this breeding material can be used in the breeding program for the enhancement of sunflower yield. The accessions G-38, G-28 and G-32 showed good performance for total seed weight, 100 seed weight, oil content and protein content.