Effectiveness of selection criteria in early stages of sugarcane varieties selection of Kamphaeng Saen 2016

Abstract

In the early stage of sugarcane selection, plants are usually selected based on visual characteristics. However, due to the large number of sugarcane varieties, only the visual characteristics selection may have opportunity to discard high quality of sugarcane. The objective of this research is to study the characteristics of leaves, yield components and cane yield that are related to quality characteristics to be used indirect characteristic for the early and high quality in the early stages of selection of 3 samples (plant cane and ratoon cane of the second stage selection and plant cane of the third stage selection). There were 124 sugarcane varieties of 8 crosses at 8 months used in this experiment by the measurement of (1) leaf characteristics (SCMR, number of fresh and dry leaves per stem, leaf width and length, leaf area per stem), (2) yield components (plant height, stem diameter and stalk number per rai), cane yield and (3) quality characteristics (amount of cane juice, amount of reducing sugar, CCS and maturity percentage). The study found that there was a significant correlation coefficient for 3 samples, SCMR was positively correlated with amount of reducing sugar (0.39, 0.27 and 0.46), plant high with amount of cane juice (0.38, 0.67 and 0.35), and negative correlation coefficient between SCMR with CCS. (- 0.20, - 0.53 and - 0.44). This experiment showed that SCMR and plant high were the characteristics that could help in the selection of sugarcane varieties with early and high-quality accumulation.