In recent years, the malt derived from the germinated barley is the key material for the malting represents the most economically favourable application for beer brewing. The main objective of barley breeding programmes is enriching yield and grain quality. Estimation of combining ability of the parents is essential to recognize better parental combinations that can yield useful cross combinations. It has been recognized from the prior studies that different parental combination perform non-traditionally i.e. superiority of different parental combination differ from cross to cross. Therefore, combining ability analysis is an appropriate way to fulfill this objective. The present research investigation was carried out with 10 parent half diallel set consisting of parents, F1’s and F2’s to estimate the general and specific combining ability variances and effects. Significance of GCA and SCA for all the studied characters in both the generations indicated the importance of both additive and non-additive gene action. An overall assessment showed that the parents RD 2508, RD 2052 and PL 419 appeared as good general combiners and the crosses DWRUB 64 × RD 2508 and RD 2592 × PL 419 appeared as good cross combinations for grain yield per plant and its contributing traits

Barley, combining ability, GCA, SCA, hybrids

An overall evaluation showed that the parent RD 2508, RD 2052 and PL 419 emerged as good general combiners while among the cross DWRUB 64 × RD 2508, RD 2592 × PL 419 and BH 946 × PL 419 emerged as good crosses for grain yield per plant as well as for other yield contributing characters. The additive gene action has been exploited more in barley, while the non-additive variance which is result of dominance and epistasis gene interaction remains to be used, which can be exploited for further improvement of barley crop through systematic breeding programme for the targeted environment. Overall evaluation of the results in the present investigation, suggested that appreciable improvement in barley production in forthcoming years would be realized through restricted recurrent selection (Hull, 1945), diallel selective mating (Jensen, 1970), use of the multiple crosses and bi-parental mating may be effective and alternative approaches for tangible advancement of barley yield in the coming years.

Madhu Yadav, Ved Prakash, Madhu Choudhary, S.S. Rajput, Sonu Get, Sarfraz Ahmad, Khushwant B. Choudhary and Shravan Kumar Sharma (2022). Combining Ability Analysis for Grain Yield and Its Contributing Traits in Barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) Under Normal Irrigated Condition of Rajasthan. Biological Forum – An International Journal, 14(2): 419-428.