The effect of potato nucleus tuber size on plant development and seed yield

Abstract

Potatoes (Solanum tuberosum L.), the world's most dominant tuber crop, play an important role in maintaining human nutrition and food security. The objectives of experiment were invitro multiplication of different potato varieties and optimization of tuber size for multiplication in field under different environmental conditions. The study material, mini tubers were collected from tissue culture Lab NIGAB, NARC and field experiment was conducted at two different locations of Gilgit i.e Babusar and Naltar during the cropping season of 2020-21. Research was conducted at two different locations during the growing season of 2020-21 at the farms of Agricultural Research Gilgit. The experiment was conducted to study the in-vitro multiplication and effect of tuber size on potato seed production. Six potato nucleus tuber sizes were sown in the first week of June using Randomized Complete Block Design (RCBD) with 03 replications at different locations with plant to plant 1 ft and row to row 2.5 ft distance. Each treatment consisted of 90 tubers, 30 tubers in each block and each block contain 3 rows 10 tubers in each. For accurate results uniform cultural practices were carried out for various treatments in each replication. Plants were irrigated as per requirements. Data was recorded from 10 randomly selected plants for each treatment in each replication. Morphological parameters consist of days to germination percentage (%), first germination, days to physiological maturity, days to flowering, leaves per plant, plant height (cm), number of main stems, tuber weight (g), tubers per plant, tuber yield (t/ha), unmarketable tuber yield (t/ha), marketable tuber yield (t/ha), weight of large tuber (g), weight of small tubers (g). Physiological parameters were consisting of total starch yield (t/h), specific gravity tuber starch content (g/100g), and tuber dry matter content. Data of the studied traits were analyzed by using computer statistical package, Statistix 8.1, to calculate the genetic variability for different traits of potato treatments. Least significant differences (LSD) test was also applied. ANOVA showed significant differences for the treatments for days to first germination, days to flowering, germination percentage, days to physiological maturity, leaves per plant, number of main stems per plant, plant height, tubers per plant, tuber yield, marketable tuber yield, size of large tubers, tuber starch content, total starch yield. Environment showed significant difference for days to first germination, germination percentage, days to flowering, days to physiological maturity, number of leaves per plant, number of main stems per plant, tuber weight, marketable tuber yield, size of large tuber, tuber starch content, total starch yield, while treatment and environment interaction showed 1 The effect of potato nucleus tuber size on plant development and seed yield Abstract non-significant differences for marketable tuber yield. The present results showed that tuber size affected yield, implying that plants from larger tubers performed well compared to smaller seeds. Large tubers contain a larger number of buds, resulting in a large number of stems and thus a large number of branches and leaves, while small tubers have a smaller number of leaves. The number of leaf yields was maximum on plants from very large tubers, decreasing almost evenly when going from large, medium to small tubers.