Breeding of Vegetable, Spice and Tuber crops (2+1)

AMARANTHUS

Floral biology

• Most Amaranthus species are monoecious. The flowers can be terminal or axial but are always organized in to glomerules with in the inflorescence. Within the glomurules, the first flower is generally staminate, and the later flowers are pistillate (Pal 1972; Joshi and Rana 1991).
• Emasculation in A.spinosus is restricted to the topping off of the upper part of the panicle carrying male flowers above the female flowers.
• After emasculation, the flower heads are bagged with butterpaper bags in A.tricolor, A.lividus and A.dubius, emasculation process is very tedious due to the intermixed nature of the male and female flowers within the same glomerule. The time of anthesis is 8.30 to 9.30am.

Breeding objectives

• To identify suitable vegetable amaranth types with high yield potential coupled with nutritional qualities and with out anti-nutrient factors.
• To develop an ‘erect’ and ’clipping’ (cutting) types, suited for early harvest for ‘pulling’ and continued harvest by periodical cutting respectively to suit different regions of Tamil Nadu and
• To develop a dual amaranth types i.i., grain cum leafy amaranth.