Association between plant architecture of the bean plant and seed size

Abstract

The widest use of technology in bean culture in Brazil has required cultivars to present more upright architecture. However, every available cultivated material which showed that sort of architecture, possesses small seeds which have less commercial acceptance. For this reason, this work was conducted over the period from February 1993 to November 1994, to verify whether there is any association between these two traits. For this goal, the F₂, F₃, F₄ and F₅ generations from the crosses Milionário x Flor de Mayo, EMGOPA 201-Ouro x Manteigão Fosco 11 and Rio Vermelho x Roxo PV were used. The screening experiments of the F₃, F₄ and F₅ families were carried out at the Universidade Federal de Lavras, in Lavras, MG, Brazil. This latter generation was also evaluated at Patos de Minas, MG, Brazil. The results obtained showed that the existence of correlation between the score of architecture and yield was not found, but a general bias of positive association between the weight of 100 seeds and yield was verified. In an overall way, no association between the architecture score and the seed weight was observed, showing to be possible to select upright plants with any seed size. However, the frequency of upright architecture families (score inferior to 3) and 100 seeds weight above 25 grams was very low.