Inheritance of androgenesis response in pepper.

BACKGROUND: Anther culture has become an important part of pepper breeding. Response to haploidy via androgenesis is highly genotype-specific. However, studies on the inheritance of response to anther culture are lacking. Therefore, the study aimed to determine the inheritance of androgenesis.

METHODS AND RESULTS: The plant material included crosses involving Capsicum annuum L. (253 A, and Inan3363) X C. chinense PI 159,236 populations. To estimate the heritability of the trait, two pepper lines with very high androgenesis responses were crossed with PI 159,236, a non-responsive accession. The androgenesis response was phenotyped using the parents, F1, F2, BC1P1, and BC1P2/P3 created through reciprocal crosses. Using variance components, the number of genes controlling the trait, broad (H2  = 0.97), and narrow sense heritabilities (h2  = 0.20), genetic variance (VG =113.8), the additive (VA =23.9), and the dominance gene variances (VD = 89.9), as well as the environmental variance (VE = 3.6) were calculated. Additive and dominant gene effects were 21% and 79%, respectively. Results derived from two different populations showed that the number of genes controlling the trait was between 1.96 and 2.46, and H2  = 0.96-0.97, h2  = 0.20-0.65, VG =91.8-113.8, VA , = 23.9-62.7, VD = 29.1-89.9, and VE =3.5-3.6 were calculated. The X2 analysis indicated that the most suitable one is the 9: 3: 4 epistatic genetic model (X2 = 2.13, P = 0.343, N = 155).

CONCLUSIONS: Results obtained from two different populations indicate the existence of a few major genes for response to androgenesis in pepper. Elucidating the inheritance of androgenesis is expected to pave the way for tagging the gene(s) in the pepper genome.