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Inheritance of and Selection for Panicle Exsertion in Semidwarf Oat

Dep. of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, Univ. of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55208

^* Corresponding author.

Incorporation of the dwarfing gene Dw6 into most oat (Avena sativa L.) backgrounds results in a plant of semidwarf height with a panicle that does not exsert from the flag leaf sheath. Since panicle exsertion is important to obtain high yield, this research was conducted to: (i) determine if two known sources of panicle exsertion designated fatua and sterilis are genetically distinct, (ii) evaluate effectiveness of selection for panicle exsertion, and (iii) determine if selection for exsertion causes correlated responses in other traits. Segregation for exsertion was evaluated in the F₂ of testcrosses between fatua- or sterilis-derived exserted semidwarf lines and the nonexserted semidwarf ‘Echidna’ and in the F₂ of intercrosses between the fatua and sterilis source lines. The F2 plants were selected, based on their level of panicle exsertion, under two selection schemes, stratified random and divergent. In the stratified scheme, the effect of incremental selection on progeny expression was evaluated in the F₃ and F₄. The effectiveness of divergent selection was evaluated in the F₃. Sterilis testcrosses exhibited unimodal F₂ distributions for panicle exsertion while fatua testcrosses and the intercrosses were bimodal. Parent-offspring regressions of exsertion values from stratified selections gave coefficients (b) ranging from 0.50 to 0.70 cm cm^–1 for F₂-F₃ combinations. Realized heritability estimates were similar for both positive and negative divergent selection and ranged from 0.47 to 0.75. Fatua and sterilis sources of panicle exsertion appear to be conditioned by different genes. Increases in exsertion due to selection were highly correlated with increases in peduncle length.

Received for publication March 6, 1989.