Genetic analysis of some characters related to yield in vegetable soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merrill)

Genetic analysis of twelve agronomic characters in 96 F 7 recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from soybean Changmai 60 × Kaori namely, leaf area, first flowering date, leaf dry weight, stem dry weight, root dry weight, total dry weight, plant height, pod numbers per plant, seed numbers per plant, seed numbers per pod, total seed weight per plant, and single seed weight, indicated that all characters were continuous variation with narrow-sense heritability between 0.30 and 0.74, and that some characters exhibited transgressive segregation. All but single-seed-weight character were statistically correlated with total-seed-weight-per-plant character. However, only pod-numbers-per-plant, and seed-numbers-per-plant characters had the highest correlation coefficients with total-seeds-weight-per-plant character having r ’s of 0.939 and 0.927, respectively. In addition, both characters had the highest narrow-sense heritability of 0.72 and 0.74, respectively. Therefore, these two characters should be employed in the vegetable soybean breeding program for high yield.