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Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea

Cowpea is an important tropical crop. It provides a large proportion of the food resource for the African human population and their livestock. The yield and quality of cowpea have been dramatically improved through traditional breeding strategies for the past few decades. However, reports of herita...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Xu, Nicole W., Xu, Shizhong, Ehlers, Jeff
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2009
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695954/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19536344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/984521
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author Xu, Nicole W.
Xu, Shizhong
Ehlers, Jeff
author_facet Xu, Nicole W.
Xu, Shizhong
Ehlers, Jeff
author_sort Xu, Nicole W.
collection PubMed
description Cowpea is an important tropical crop. It provides a large proportion of the food resource for the African human population and their livestock. The yield and quality of cowpea have been dramatically improved through traditional breeding strategies for the past few decades. However, reports of heritability estimates for early growth of cowpea are rare. We designed a simple experiment to estimate the broad-sense heritability of early growth. We randomly selected 15 cowpea varieties among a total of 5000 cowpea accessions maintained in the cowpea breeding facility at the University of California, Riverside to examine the genetic determination of early growth of cowpea (measured as the height at day five after seeding). The estimated broad-sense heritability on the individual plant basis is 0.2190. However, the corresponding estimate on the plant mean basis (average of four plants) is 0.5198, which is very high for a quantitative trait. The high heritability may explain why traditional breeding for cowpea growth is so effective. Since the design of experiment and method of data analysis are novel, this report can serve as an educational note for students in the area of quantitative genetics and plant breeding.
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spelling pubmed-26959542009-06-17 Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea Xu, Nicole W. Xu, Shizhong Ehlers, Jeff Int J Plant Genomics Research Article Cowpea is an important tropical crop. It provides a large proportion of the food resource for the African human population and their livestock. The yield and quality of cowpea have been dramatically improved through traditional breeding strategies for the past few decades. However, reports of heritability estimates for early growth of cowpea are rare. We designed a simple experiment to estimate the broad-sense heritability of early growth. We randomly selected 15 cowpea varieties among a total of 5000 cowpea accessions maintained in the cowpea breeding facility at the University of California, Riverside to examine the genetic determination of early growth of cowpea (measured as the height at day five after seeding). The estimated broad-sense heritability on the individual plant basis is 0.2190. However, the corresponding estimate on the plant mean basis (average of four plants) is 0.5198, which is very high for a quantitative trait. The high heritability may explain why traditional breeding for cowpea growth is so effective. Since the design of experiment and method of data analysis are novel, this report can serve as an educational note for students in the area of quantitative genetics and plant breeding. Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2009 2009-06-07 /pmc/articles/PMC2695954/ /pubmed/19536344 http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/984521 Text en Copyright © 2009 Nicole W. Xu et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Xu, Nicole W.
Xu, Shizhong
Ehlers, Jeff
Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title_full Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title_fullStr Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title_full_unstemmed Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title_short Estimating the Broad-Sense Heritability of Early Growth of Cowpea
title_sort estimating the broad-sense heritability of early growth of cowpea
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2695954/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19536344
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2009/984521
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