NONALLELIC GENE INTERACTIONS IN THE INHERITANCE OF QUANTITATIVE CHARACTERS IN BARLEY

Abstract

Intercrosses among four homozygous "isogenic" lines of barley differing with respect to two pairs of short chromosomal segments were used to study the relative importance of additive, dominace, and epistatic gene action in the inheritance of eight quantitative characters. These two chromosomal segments were found to be genetically active for seven among the eight characters.The environmental variance compound was bigger than the genotype-compound and this was bigger than the genotype x environment compound. Epistatic variance consituted a major part of the total genetic variance.