Inheritance and Association of Oil and Protein Content and Seed Coat Type in Sesame, Sesamum Indicum L.

breeders will probably concentrate more effort on other agronomic and chemical characteristics of this plant. A knowledge of the genetic behavior of oil content, protein content and seed coat type should be helpful in the selection of high oil and protein lines. The purpose of this paper is to report inheritance studies of oil content, protein content and rough and smooth seed coat type along with the associations which exist among these characters. Information pertaining to the inheritance of oil content, protein content and seed coat type in sesame is limited. KINMAN and STARK (1954) reported oil and protein content of the seed of 24 varieties grown at College Station, Texas, in 1950. The range in oil and protein content for varieties was 45.29 to 63.38 and 16.69 to 27.25 percent. respectively, indicating the presence of a rather high degree of variability in the expression of these two characters. The oil and protein content of eight varieties grown at ten locations were given. The mean oil content for varieties exhibited a range of 47.34 to 55.45 percent and for locations a range of 50.63 to 56.58 percent. The mean protein for varieties exhibited a range of 25.09 to 28.21 percent and for locations a range of 22.24 to 29.49 percent. These data indicated that oil and, to a lesser extent, protein content of sesame seed are markedly influenced by both genotype and environment. They suggest that the genetic and environmental influences affecting protein content inversely affect oil content and that protein synthesis is favored over oil synthesis as the nitrogen supply to the seed increases. CULP (1953), in a preliminary study of the inheritance of oil content and seed coat type in sesame, found that seed coat type was simply inherited, being conditioned by one pair of genes, and that two to seven polygenes were involved in the inheritance of oil content. Rough seed was found to possess lower oil content than smooth seeded segregates. This is due to the fact that the rough seed coat makes up a larger part of the total seed weight than the smooth seed coat. (It 5 resistant indehiscent sesame varieties adapted to mechanized harvesting,