Journal of Applied and Natural Science 10 (2): 773 - 778 (2018) ISSN : 0974-9411 (Print), 2231-5209 (Online) journals.ansfoundation.org Genetic variability study in F 2 population of tetraploid dicoccum wheat crosses Channappagouda Patil Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad- 580005 (Karnataka), India Deepak Koujalagi* Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, G. B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology, Pantnagar-263153 (Uttarakhand), India *Corresponding author. E-mail: Koujalagi.deepak@gmail.com ABSTRACT The aim of the present investigation was to estimate the genetic variability parameters in Wheat (Triticum dicoccum) F 2 population of the cross DDK1025 X ML-1. The traits in- volved in study were grain yield, threshability, rachis percent and other yield contributing traits such as tiller number, number of grains per spike, number of spikelet’s per spike, etc. and the genetic variability parameters estimated are mean, range, Phenotypic coef- ficient of variation (PCV), Genotypic coefficient of variation (GCV), heritability and genet- ic advance over mean. The results obtained from the study reveals higher mean and wider range for all the traits especially for plant height, tiller number, spikelets per spike, number of grains per spikelet, spike length, grain yield per plant, threshability and rachis. High degree of PCV with moderate GCV was observed for the traits like number of tiller per plant (20.96 PCV and 15.96 GCV), number of grains per spike (21.92 PCV and 18.79 GCV), rachis % (22.5 PCV and 19.10 GCV) and grain yield per plant (20.07 PCV and 18.10) . Heritability and genetic advance was recorded to high for all the traits in both the populations. On the basis of an overall consideration of the genetic variability parameters it may be concluded that F 2 population of the cross, DDK-1025 x ML-1 have the potential source for improving the yield and its associated traits and also offering some scope in altering the plant height. Keywords: Coefficient of variation, Genetic advance, Heritability, Threshability, Variability Article Info DOI:10.31018/jans.v10i2.1777 Received: March 1, 2018 Revised: April 14, 2018 Accepted: May 17, 2018 How to Cite Patil, C. and Koujalagi, D. (2018). Genetic variability study in F 2 population of tetraploid dicoccum wheat crosses. Journal of Applied and Natural Science, 10 (2): 773 - 778 INTRODUCTION Wheat (Triticum spp), the versatile cereal food is also described as the stuff of life. It continues to retain this pride of place with its roots ramifying into the depths of human culture with evolutionary history parallel with the human civilization itself. Even today, it occupies primary position among all the cereal crops due to its feeding bowl to man- kind. It is consumed by 2.5 billion people in 89 countries. It super-cedes maize or rice as a source of protein in low- and middle-income na- tions and is second only to rice as a source of calories and proteins. Nearly US $50 billion-worth of wheat is traded globally each year (CGIAR, 2018). Grown on more land than any other crop, more than 215 million hectares of wheat are har- vested annually to generate a world production of almost 700 million to, making it the third most pro- duced cereal after maize and rice (Islam et al. 2017). In India, wheat is the second most im- portant crop after rice occupying 30.22 million hectares with a production of 93. 501 million tones and the average productivity is 3093 kg ha -1 (DES, 2018). These cultivated plants produced non- shattering inflorescences and soft fruiting bodies, which made them suitable for human planting and harvesting. The cultivated plants can be easily distinguished from their progenitors based on a suite of characters known as ―domestication syn- drome‖ (Doebley et al., 2006). The important step in the evolution of modern polyploid wheat was the domestication of tetraploid emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum Schuebler) from its progenitor Triticum turgidum subsp. dicoccoides. The re- mains of cultivated emmer have been discovered at several archaeological sites in Syria dating to 7500 BC (Zohary and Hopf, 1993). Unlike the wild progenitor, domesticated tetraploid wheats have a non-brittle rachis but the early domesticated em- mer wheat, T. turgidum subsp. dicoccum, has hulled seeds (Dubcovsky and Dvorak, 2007). Wheat is known to be temperate crop, however it is being cultivated in tropical ecosystem of India, where prevalence of high temperature during crop growth and peculiar climatic conditions coupled This work is licensed under Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). © 2018: Author (s). Publishing rights @ ANSF.