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Soybean which is known as miracle bean or golden bean is one of the most important leguminous and oilseed crops of India. Despite its qualitative values and economic importance, soybean production is relatively low in our country due to poor genetic make-up of cultivars available. The effectiveness of selection depends on magnitude of variability for yield and its component traits. Study of inter-relationships among yield and contributing traits is also necessary. Keeping all these facts in view, this study was conducted to determine the variability, heritability, character association and path coefficient analysis between yield and its contributing characters of six different soybean genotypes for selecting the best parents for undertaking a breeding programme. The genotypes exhibited a wide range of variability for days to 50 per cent flowering, plant height, days to maturity, 100-seed weight, and seed yield. All the characters except 100-seed weight were also displayed high heritability. High genetic advance was observed for plant height, days to 50 per cent flowering and seed yield. Seed yield had significant positive genotypic and phenotypic correlation with days to maturity whereas plant height showed negative correlation with seed yield. Path coefficient analysis revealed that days to maturity showed positive direct effect with seed yield. Hence, the results suggested that selection should be based on later maturing genotypes for harvesting maximum yield.

Keywords: Genetic variability, correlation, direct & indirect effects, yield, soybean.