Inheritance of androgenesis response in pepper

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.

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 (V_G=113.8), the additive (V_A=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, V_G=91.8-113.8, V_A, = 23.9-62.7, V_D = 29.1-89.9, and V_E=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).

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.