Strategies for selection among half-sibling popcorn progeniesin Cerrado soil of Tocantins, Brazil

Abstract

The study of genetic diversity allows the formation of heterotic groups, which are important to direct crosses and to derive segregating populations in breeding programs. In this sense, the objective with this study was to determine the correlation between productive attributes, as well as the genetic divergence of half-sibling progenies of popcorn corn in the conditions of the cerrado of Tocantins, Brazil. For this, an experiment was conducted at the Universidade Federal do Tocantins, campusGurupi, in a randomized block design with three replicates, where the treatments were composed of 40 progenies of half-sibs of popcorn, originating from the population UFT popcorn. The half-sib progenies showed great variability with respect to both expansion capacity and grain yield. The measures of genetic dissimilarity, calculated from the Mahalanobis distance showed high magnitude which also demonstrated wide genetic variability. The study concluded that there is genetic variability among half-sib progenies of popcorn and this allows identification of dissimilar progeny and average productivity and expansion capacity commercially acceptable.