Diversity and relationship of yiled components and fruit quality in promising floricane raspberry hybrids

M. Nikolich, J. Milivojevich, M. Fotirich Aksich, D. Nikolich, V. Rakonjac, A. Radovich

Abstract: Raspberry breeding objectives are primarily aimed at developing cultivars with higher productivity, large fruits with the excellent quality. Most of them were developed by the method of planned hybridization and much smaller number by inbreeding and clonal selection. Major yield components and fruit quality of 20 promising floricane raspberry seedlings with red and yellow fruits obtained by open pollination of cv. `Meeker` yellow clone were investigated in this study. Compared with the cv. `Meeker`, raspberry hybrids lagged behind the standard cultivar in yield components, but surpassed it in terms of fruit quality. Taking into account the yield components, number of fruiting laterals per cane showed a significant correlation with the largest number of morphological fruit traits tested. Results of multivariate analysis indicate that the first three components explained 73.12% of the total variability observed. The highest values of first principal component (PC1) are related to fruit weight, length and fruit width, number of fruiting laterals per cane and sucrose content. In PC2, the highest values were associated with length of fruiting laterals and the number of flowers. Some of the hybrids have many favourable characteristics that are commercially important for cultivation and can be used for further breeding. Principal component analysis showed that the most important traits to distinguish raspberry hybrids are those related to fruit size and number and length of fruiting laterals.

Keywords: chemical traits; correlation; fruit characteristics; generative potential; PCA

Date published: 2019-02-20