Índice de seleção e estimativa de parâmetros genéticos e fenotípicos para características relacionadas com a produção de milho-verde

Abstract

Brazil is one of the largest producers of corn of the world and it possesses great potential for vegetable corn production. Besides adding value to the product, the commercialization of vegetable corn increased in the last years. There is shortage of information about the evaluation and the acquisition of genotypes destined to the production of vegetable corn and also on genetic studies of the traits involved in this production. The objective of this work was to estimate the genetic and phenotypic parameters, and the genetic correlation, and to classify and identify hybrids of promising vegetable corn to the consumer market and to evaluate the efficiency of the attributed economical weights. The results determined that the selection will succeed, for the different traits of vegetable corn, because the heritability was of high magnitude to the appraised traits. Evaluation of husked ears yield (PEE) was enough to define which hybrid presents better commercial ear productivity, diameter and corn ear length. This indicates that those traits could be discarded in the selection process of genotypes of breeding programs for vegetable corn production. The hybrids HS48, HS27, HS24, HS25 and HS12 accumulated the largest number of desirable traits in a single genotype based on the sum of rank index. The used economical weights were efficient to distinguish and identify the most promising hybrid for vegetable corn production and they can be used as a selection criterion in programs of breeding of vegetable corn.