A Comprehensive Program for Griffings and Gardner-Eberhart Analyses

Diallel mating designs provide to breeders useful genetic information, such as general combining ability (GCA) and specific combining ability (SCA), to help them devise appropriate breeding and selection strategies. Here we report a muchimproved version of DIALLEL-SAS that was originally released in 1997. The new program, DIALLEL-SAS05, has a clear and user-friendly interface that was designed to meet usersʹ needs for various diallel-cross design experiments. DIALLELSAS05 has major advantages over DIALLEL-SAS in that: (i) it analyzes not only all four Griffingʹs diallel methods (both fixed and random models), but it also computes Gardner-Eberhartʹs Analyses II and III; (ii) it provides desired results from diallel experiments with parent number from 4 to 12, (iii) it can analyze diallel data from any number of environments, and (iv) for a random-effects model, it provides estimates of GCA (2g) and SCA (2s) variances, which can be used to estimate additive (2A) and dominance (2D) variances, and ultimately narrow-sense heritability (h2). DIALLEL-SAS05 also provides information on GCA x ENV, SCA x ENV, reciprocal x ENV, maternal x ENV, and nonmaternal x ENV interactions, when applicable. DIALLEL-SAS05 should greatly improve researchersʹ efficiency in analyzing and interpreting diallel-cross data. The program code is available on a CD from the corresponding author.