Heritability estimates of citral content in East Indian lemongrass.

Citral content in oil obtained from 80 representative clones, chosen randomly from a population raised from open-pollinated seeds of clonally propagated East Indian lemongrass variety 'SD-68' and their half-sib progenies was estimated by gas chromatography. Heritability estimates were determined by variance component and parent-offspring regression analyses. Broad-sense heritability was 0.49 while narrow sense heritabilities by variance and regression analyses were 0.37 and 0.24, respectively. Phenotypic and genotypic correlations between citral content in oil and oil content were very low both among the parental clones (-0.01 and -0.01, respectively) and among their progenies (0.13 and 0.08, respectively) indicating that selection for either of these traits would not have much effect on the other.