Broad-sense Heritability Estimates for Fruit Color and Morphological Traits from Open-pollinated Half-sib Mango Families
2009
Brown, J Steven | Schnell, Raymond J. | Ayala-Silva, Tomás | Moore, J Michael | Tondo, Cecile L. | Winterstein, Michael C.
The visual appearance of mangos is a primary factor in determining consumer acceptance and sale, similar to other fruit and vegetable commodities. Even if the appeal of visual appearance is based on consumer perception rather than on established quality factors, breeders must usually select within the range of acceptance, at least in some countries. Mango selection using multiyear breeding programs is slowly replacing the former method by which most earlier cultivars were selected, namely from chance seedlings either from planned or unplanned crosses. The knowledge of heritability of traits as they are controlled by genetics and experimental design and the effects and interaction of these two sets of factors on achieved gain have become more critical. The use of portable colorimeters has been shown to give repeatable scores in a quantitative, three-dimensional space for fruits and vegetables. In this experiment, we calculated broad-sense heritability estimates for five color traits, three morphological fruit traits, and one disease resistance trait (anthracnose expressed on the fruit). Estimates were found to be relatively high, indicating good potential for improvement through breeding. For nearly all traits measured, variance within families was greater than that among families, illustrating the likely importance of heterozygosity, dominance, and epistasis in these crosses. The careful estimation of heritability and repeatability will help prioritize and increase the efficiency of trait improvement as breeding methods become more sophisticated and competition for funding increases.
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