Inheritance of Traits Affecting Flavor in Cucumber and Introduction of the Best Index for Flavor Breeding

Based on the previous investigation results, fifteen Iranian cucumber landraces, eight as male and seven as female, were crossed with each with each other in an 8×7 factorial design, North Carolina Design II (NCD II). Eight quantitative and qualitative components including flesh texture firmness, skin texture firmness, aroma, taste, crunchy, fruit dry matter content, fruit flesh size and placental diameter/fruit diameter ratio were evaluated in F1 hybrids. In factorial design, male and female were not significant for most of the traits. indicating that the additive genetic variance did not contribute on controlling the traits. Male × female interaction was significant for all of the traits. Therefore, F1 hydrids can be used for getting hetrosis in all of the characters. High broad-sense heritability of hybrids showed high genetic variations of the traits in the germplams. The genetic correlations showed that decreasing placental diameter/fruit diameter ratio increased fruit crunchy and more crunchy fruits had the better taste. The 97 × 39 hybrid was the best hybrid via aroma, taste traits related to mid-parents and superior parent. The best selection criteria for breeding of the flavor was aroma, taste and crunchy selection. Ratio of gain from selection index related to that from aroma, taste and crunchy selection, separately were about 1.009, 1.004 and 1.001 percent more, respectively.