The effectiveness of using a minituber crop for selection of agronomic characters in potato breeding programmes

Performance of 20 potato genotypes was studied for seven agronomic characters in crops raised from minitubers and normal seed tubers. Correlation coefficients were computed between minituber crop and normal seed crop in order to study the selection efficiency at minituber crop level. The performance of normal seed crop was significantly better than the minituber crop for various characters including tuber yield and its components. Correlation coefficients between minituber and normal seed crop were significant for various characters except number of stems and number of tubers. Highest correlation coefficient (r = 0.86) was for tuber yield followed by average tuber weight (r = 0.67) and number of nodes (r = 0.63). The results suggest that selection for tuber yield can be practised at the minituber crop level in potato breeding programmes.