Research Note Performance of improved sunflower populations for resistance to Alternaria leaf blight and productivity

An experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of two sunflower populations viz., C₃ (three cycles of improvement through recurrent selection without pollen selection) and C₃G₃ (three cycles of improvement through recurrent selection with pollen selection) for their reaction to Alternaria leaf blight, seed yield and yield components. The C₃ and C₃G₃ populations were compared for mean and variances. The Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) test indicated the significant differences among the populations for distribution. The frequency distribution revealed that the C₃G₃ population was skewed towards resistance with higher frequency of plants with lower PDI (per cent disease index) values compared to C₃ population. The C3G3 population showed significantly higher mean seed yield than C3 population suggesting that in population improved with pollen selection, the selection response was better. The frequency distribution for seed yield, head diameter and volume weight revealed the presence of higher frequency of plants in C3G3 population with high yielding, larger heads with high volume weight.