Inheritance of major chemical components in Hops

Abstract

Heritability for hop quality include both resins and essential oils was estimated using the intrasire regression of offspring on dam, and relatively high values were obtained, except for alpha-acids/beta-acids, β-caryophyllene and humulene/β-caryophyllene. A gap was found in the histogram for the cohumulone ratio and the result of x2-test suggested that a complete dominant gene was involved which produced high ratio. The segregation pattern of farnescene was shown to be skewed and a logarithmic transformation was necessary to calculate heritability as an additive trait. In addition to providing a genetic correlation, these results provide information to the hop breeder which can be used to design more efficient breeding programs.