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A diverse set of 112 common bean (Paseolus vulgaris L.) accessions were evaluated for variation in eight traits related to yield over a 2-year period. Days to flower, days of pod fill, and days to maturity ranged from 25 to 66, 44 to 83, and 70 to 133, respectively, in upstate New York: Yield and biomass ranged from 81 to 387 and 270 to 1087 g•m-2, respectively. Harvest index ranged from 12% to 65%. The biomass (biomass/days to maturity) and seed (yield/days of pod fill) growth rates ranged from 3.2 to 9.3 and 1.2 to 9.5 g•m-2 -day-1, respectively. The economic growth rate (yield/days to maturity) extended from 0.6 to 5.7 g•m-2 -day-1. The growth rates, biomass, and days of pod fill were linearly and positively related to yield. Biomass and the growth rates explained a large amount of the variation in yield, with r 2 values between 0.71 and 0.84; days of pod fill explained the least, with r 2 = 0.09. Yield followed a curvilinear relationship with days to flower and days to maturity; yield was maximized at 48.5 days to flower and 112.2 days to maturity. Yield was a quadratic function of harvest index and maximized at 57.2%. Among these three curvilinear traits, days to flower explained 80% of the variation in yield, while days to maturity and harvest index accounted for 25% and 12.5%, respectively. The “ideal” genotype for New York was defined at these maximum values for harvest index, days to maturity, days to flower, and at 63.7 days of pod fill. Additionally, a simple equation is proposed to aid breeders in the selection of common bean accessions with strong sink strength. It is defined as “relative sink strength”: RSS = seed growth rate/biomass growth rate. Values > 1.0 implied strong sink capacity in common beans.
One-hundred-twelve common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) lines of diverse origin were grown in three environments in 1986 and two environments in 1987. The purpose was to estimate broad-sense heritabilities of nine yield-related traits and the phenotypic, genetic, and environmental correlations among them. The traits and their heritabilities were seed yield (0.90), biomass (0.93), harvest index (0.92), days to maturity (0.96), days to flower (0.98), days of pod fill (0.94), biomass growth rate (biomass/days to maturity) (0.87), seed growth rate (seed yield/days of pod fill) (0.87), and economic growth rate (seed yield/days to maturity) (0.86). These high heritabilities were attributed to the broad genetic diversity and the comparatively small variances associated with the genotype × environment interactions. Genetic correlations of yield were: with biomass, 0.86; harvest index, 0.42; days to maturity, 0.40; days to flower, 0.33; days of pod fill, 0.24; biomass growth rate, 0.92; seed growth rate, 0.84; and the economic growth rate, 0.85. The concomitant phenotypic correlations were mostly equal to the genetic correlations for biomass and the three growth rates, but lower for the phonological traits (days to maturity, flower, and pod fill). Harvest index had the lowest correlations with yield. Correlations were also reported for the other 28 pairwise combinations among these nine traits. Indirect selection was explored with yield as the primary trait and the other eight as secondary traits. Estimates of relative selection efficiency (p) suggested that indirect selection was not a viable option for increasing common bean yields or identifying superior parents.