ESTIMATES OF HERITABILITY FOR SEED YIELD AND YIELD COMPONENTS OF SAFFLOWER (Carthamus tinctorius L.)

Abstract

Safflower is usually considered to be a selfpollinated
crop. However, the detectable crossing
ranged from 5 to 40 per cent. Safflower is traditionally
grown for its flowers which were used for colouring,
flavouring and making dyes. Besides, in Indian
varieties it contains 30% oil. Safflower oil is primarily
used for cooking. The oil contains high amount of
linoleic acid (76%), which is very useful for patients
suffering from heart diseases. The unsaturated fatty
acids of safflower lower the serum cholesterol
(Nimbkar, 2002). The conventional breeding methods
have not been very efficient for improving
quantitatively inherited characters viz., seed yield,
oil content, tolerance to stresses and horizontal
resistance to diseases and insects. Moreover, the
crossing and record keeping procedures are often both
money and time consuming for the rate of progress
attained. Conventional methods have several
limitations such as limited use of available genetic
variability resulting in the development of varieties
with a narrow genetic base, successive loss of genes
in the segregating generation with no chance of
recombination for genes linked for yield and oil
content. These limitations can be overcome by
application of recurrent selection method in selfpollinating
crops including Safflower. Considering the
above facts the present study was taken with the
objective to determine the narrow-sense heritability
for seed yield and its components from half-sib
selection method.