Diallel crosses as mating designs are commonly used to study the genetic properties of inbred lines in animal and plant breeding experiments. Suppose there are p inbred lines and let a cross between lines i and j be denoted by(i,j), i<j=1,2,…, p. ...
Diallel crosses as mating designs are commonly used to study the genetic properties of inbred lines in animal and plant breeding experiments. Suppose there are p inbred lines and let a cross between lines i and j be denoted by(i,j), i<j=1,2,…, p. Let n_(c) denote the total number of distinct crosses in the experiment. Our interest lies in comparing the parents with respect to their general combining ability(gca) parameters. The complete diallel cross(CDC) involves all possible crosses among the p parental lines with n_(c) = p(p-1)/2. Sometimes p tends to be large resulting in a large number of crosses, and it becomes impractical to carry out even one replication of the diallel cross. In such situations a partial diallel cross(PDC) may be used for carrying out the experiment. The patial diallel cross(PDC) is often used n_(c) = ps/2. here s(p-1) refer to the number of lines each line is crossed with.
Diallel crosses in completely randomized designs have been discussed by several authors, e.g. Kempthorne and Currow(1961), Singh and Hinkelmann and Kempthorne(1963), Hinkelmann(1975), Singh and Hinkelmann(1990). Optimal block designs for complete dlallel crosses have been considered by Gupta and Kageyama(1994), Dey and Midha(1996), and Das, Dey and Dean(1998). Singh and Hinkelmann(1995) gave efficient block designs for partial diallel crosses using partially balanced incomplete block designs. Orthogonal blocking of partial diallel crosses was considered by Gupta, Das and Kageyama(1995).
In this paper, A class of block designs for general combining ability comparisons within two groups of inbred lines in diallel crosses is given. These block designs are constructed by using balanced block designs obtained by cyclically developing a single initial block. Also, the efficiencies of block designs are tabulated for number of lines 26 or less.