Browsing by Author "Danquah, Eric Yirenkyi"

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    Heritability of drought resistance in Solanum aethiopicum Shum group and combining ability of genotypes for drought tolerance and recovery
    (Scientia Horticulturae, 2018) Sseremba, Godfrey; Tongoona, Pangirayi; Eleblu, John; Danquah, Eric Yirenkyi; Balyejusa Kizito, Elizabeth
    Drought tolerance is a complex trait whose inheritance had not been investigated in Solanum aethiopicum L. Shum group. This is partly because of perceived cross incompatibilities in the crop. This study relied on 24 successful crosses from an incomplete 9×4 North Carolina II mating design, evaluated under five watering conditions based on plant growth stage and watering level in order to determine the heritability of drought resistance and combining ability. Subsequent data analyses were based on restricted maximum likelihood. Overall, specific combining ability (SCA) effects were significant across and within watering environments for all study traits. The most highly heritable traits (in the narrow-sense) were identified as leaves per plant, chlorophyll content (CHL), leaf fresh yield and leaf dry yield while leaf area (LA), leaf relative water content (LRWC) and leaf mass area (LMA) were least heritable. However, the broad sense heritability (H2) was over 0.80 for seven of the traits, indicating that dominance gene action surpass additive gene effects for drought resistance in S. aethiopicum Shum. Further analysis showed that LA is suited for selection of best combiners under wellwatered and drought-stress (DS) treatments. The LRWC served best in separating the SCA effects of crosses under DS. The CHL produced clear separations of SCA effects under both DS and drought recovery while LMA served best under the latter.
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    Stability of Solanum aethiopicum Shum accessions under varied water deficit stress levels and identification of pertinent breeding traits for resistance to water shortage
    (Euphytica, 2018) Sseremba, Godfrey; Tongoona, Pangirayi; Yaw Eleblu, John Savior; Danquah, Eric Yirenkyi; Kaweesi, Tadeo; Baguma, Yona; Masanza, Michael; Balyejusa Kizito, Elizabeth
    Drought is a major constraint to productivity of Solanum aethiopicum ‘Shum’ group due to loss in market and nutrient value of stressed plants. This study evaluated S. aethiopicum Shum group accessions to identify genotypes (G) that excel across moisture deficit stress levels (WLs). A split-plot arrangement composed of four WLs and twenty accessions of S. aethiopicum as main plot and subplot factors, respectively, was implemented in a screenhouse, and repeated for two experiments. In each experiment, there was a highly significant effect of at least two WLs on mean performance among at least two accessions for most of the traits at p\0.05. Further, very highly significant WL 9 G interactions were obtained for leaf relative water content (LRWC), leaves per plant (LPP) and plant height (PH), and nonsignificant for leaf blade length and leaf blade width. The order of priority as breeding traits for stability superiority across WLs was suggested as LRWC[PH[LPP. Consequently, based on LRWC, the most superiorly stable accessions were identified as accession 160 followed by accessions 145, 137, 108P and 184G while the least stable ones were identified as accessions 163G, 141, 163 and 108. The broad sense heritability (H2) for each of the three recommended traits for drought resistance breeding was above 0.9 thus supportive for a good response to selection. Drought stress negatively affected the performance of S. aethiopicum Shum group but the exhibited variation allowed for selection of superiorly stable genotypes.