Not AvailableSorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench), the fifth most important cereal crop worldwide, is best known for its adaptation to drought prone semi-arid tropical regions in poor soils. To meet the increased demand for food grains and to make sorghum cultivation more profitable, productivity of sorghum needs to be improved. To increase the productivity of sorghum, there is a continuous demand for high yielding sorghum cultivars with broad genetic base. Sorghum is endowed with high variability due to its wide range of adaptation in tropical and temperate climates, and free gene exchange among various races. Sorghum breeders in India have used germplasm lines belonging to different races (Audilakshmi et al. 2003), and its yield has been increased by more than 50%. Of late, in India and in the world, the potential yield levels of sorghum have reached a plateau, and there is an urgent need for diversification of the genetic base of the breeding material to break the yield plateau. Further improvement in yield can be brought out by component breeding where the genotypes will be improved for important yield components through pyramiding of the genes responsible for different yield components such as number of primary branches, number of secondary branches, number of grains/panicle, panicle length, width and weight etc (Aruna and Audilakshmi 2008). Identification of important agronomic traits in different germplasm lines and incorporating them in elite background is very important for yield improvement. Even more important is to ensure that the selected germplasm line passes on the trait of our interest to the next generation. The concept of general and specific combining ability is useful to characterize the genotypes for their ability to pass on the trait of interest. Hence a field experiment was conducted to evaluate sorghum germplasm lines for their general combining ability for yield and important yield components to facilitate their use in sorghumNot Availabl
