Heterosis and combining ability of morphological and forage quality predictors of silage corn in central valley of Mexico

摘要

The livestock feeding in the Highland Valleys of Central Mexico is based on harvest, grazing and annual forage conservation, being forage maize the most important silage crop ( Cervantes et al., 1978).Even though forage maize is extensively bred in Europe, USA and Asia since 1900's, this started in Mexico in the 1960's, and little is known about the genetic characterization in both agronomic and nutritive value traits.Our breeding program goals are to adapt temperate and tropical germplasm to Central Mexico, analyze combining ability of biomass and quality predictors and to study the genetic relationship of inbred lines between lowland tropical and temperate races using both genetic and molecular approaches.