Crop Breeding and Applied Biotechnology (Jan 2009)
Selection of popcorn inbred lines based on performance and genealogy of S5 progenies and plants
Abstract
The development of hybrids is the most important objective in a corn breeding program. The objectives of thisstudy were to select and assess inbred lines, and to discuss the efficiency of four cycles of among and within inbred familyselection. Two experiments were evaluated, one with 144 S5 progenies of the popcorn population Beija-Flor and another withseven inbred lines. Based on expected gains in expansion volume, the best selective procedure was mass selection. The 14selected inbred lines should be divergent, because only two pairs were derived from the same S3 or S4 family. The analysis ofselection efficiency demonstrated that it is important to select superior plants in families with poorer performance to minimizethe loss of superior genotypes. The quality of the evaluated inbred lines was comparable to commercial populations and theyield satisfactory. The information about genealogy did not increase the inbred line selection efficiency.
