MATING DESIGNS: HELPFUL TOOL FOR QUANTITATIVE PLANT BREEDING ANALYSIS

Abstract

Selection of parental materials and good mating designs in conventional plant breeding are the keys to the successful plant breeding programme. However, there are several factors affecting the choices of mating designs. Mating design refers to the procedure of producing the progenies, in plant breeding, plant breeders and geneticists, theoretically and practically, they use different form of mating designs and arrangements for targeted purpose. The choice of a mating design for estimating genetic variances should be dictated by the objectives of the study, time, space, cost and other biological limitations. In all mating designs, the individuals are taken randomly and crossed to produce progenies which are related to each other as half-sibs or full-sibs. A form of multivariate analysis or the analysis of variance can be adopted to estimate the components of variances. Therefore, this review aimed at highlighting the most used mating design in plant breeding and genetics studies. It provides easy and quick insight of the different form of mating designs and some statistical components for successful plant breeding.