Published in Scientific Papers. Series A. Agonomy., Vol. LVI
Written by Andrei FILIPENCO, Valentin MANDACHE, Gabriela VÂLSAN, Florin IVAN, Ion CIOCĂZANU
Utilization of a reliable, large scale, fast, non-destructive methods for assessing the speed of corn grain dry-down rate(DDR) (speed of loosing water from grain between physiological maturity and harvest) in early stages of the breedingprogram, to identify real differences among genotypes, is proposed. Non-destructive determinations of the grainmoisture of individual plants with a wooden moisture (Voltcraft FM-200 Humidity meter) were performed for a largenumber of genotypes, hybrids and inbred lines from Romanian Pioneer corn breeding program, during 2010-2012.Calibration curves (issued on the basis of successive determinations of the grain moisture by using in parallel thewooden moisture and standard gravimetric method) were used to transform the wooden moisture readings inestimated% grain moistures (EPGM). A synthetic selection index (DDIND), represented by the slopes of the linearregression line between EPGM and measurement timing were computed. DDIND computed as describe above wasused to compute ANOVA analysis. Preliminary results showed that DDIND had a large degree of precision; asignificant part of the DDIND variation was due to genotypic variations in all analyzed experiments, suggesting thatreal differences in genotype with regard to DDIND could be detected by this method. Additional studies are necessaryto determine if selection on the basis of DDIND would results in releasing of superior commercial hybrids with fastDDR.
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