Inheritance of fruit attributes in chilli pepper

Abstract

Capsicum annuum has been known for the amount of variability present in the genus for fruit traits and also for other morphological traits. The present study usedF1 and F2 generations developed from diverse parental stocks to report the inheritance pattern for different fruits traits. Our results demonstrate that pepper fruit bearing habit, its colour at unripe stage and fruit apex are simply inherited traits with or without epistatic interactions while fruit length is a quantitative character. Fruit orientation(drooping or erect) and fruit habit (solitary or cluster)showed segregation ratio of 3:1 indicating monogenic inheritance of the trait where drooping character was dominant in nature over erect type and solitary fruit type was dominant over cluster type, fruit bearing habit (single pendant, single erect, cluster pendant and cluster erect) exhibited typical dihybrid ratio of 9:3:3:1, fruit colour at unripe stage (green, purple and mixture of green & purple) segregated in the ratio of 9:3:4 exhibiting recessive gene epistasis and fruit apex (acute or blunt) showed a ratio of 15:1 indicating duplicate dominant gene epistasis. Fruit length exhibited quantitative inheritance with plants showing fruit length greater than the positive parent (parent showing higher fruit length among the two parents) and lesser than the negative parent (parent showing lesser fruit length among the two parents) from different crosses. These results provide new data to clarify and further add on to the information available on the inheritance of chilli pepper fruit attributes.