The mean squares of SCA were larger
than those of GCA in all the characters except
for reducing sugars indicating the preponderance
of non-additive gene action in the control of
most of the characters. Involvement of nonadditive
gene action for the characters in present
investigation is also in consonance with the
findings of Anantha (2004) and Selvarani (2007)
for days to tasseling, Geetha and Jayaraman
(2000), Anantha (2004) and Prakash and
Ganguli (2004) for plant height, Jayakumar and
Sundaram (2007) for number of leaves per plant,
Rodrigues and da Silva (2002) for baby corn
length and Suneetha et al. (2000) for nonreducing
sugars. On other hand, higher GCA
value recorded for reducing sugars than its SCA
value indicating involvement of additive genes.
This suggested that simple selection would be
effective to make desirable improvement of the
character under study