Author(s):
Sesame is an important agricultural commodity in earning foreign currency for Ethiopia. However, its productivity in Western Ethiopia has been constrained due to harsh weather conditions and severe diseases. Hence local landraces are better adaptable to environmental conditions in which they were evolved, collection and evaluation of landraces is the preliminary plant breeding task to develop high yielding and adaptable variety. Thus, the experiment was conducted at Kamashi and Pawe during 2014-2016 to evaluate 18 sesame genotypes consisted of 17 landraces screened from collections of Western Ethiopia, and one check. The experiment was laid out on randomized complete block design with three replications. Data was collected on days to 50% flowering, bacterial blight disease severity, days to maturity, plant height, plant height to first branch, number of branches/plant number of capsules/plant, number of seeds/capsule,1000 seeds weight and seed yield/plot. Analysis of variance on combined data revealed significance difference among environments for all traits while the genotypes were significantly different for days to flowering, bacterial blight disease severity, number of branches/plant 1000 seeds weight and seed yield. Combined analysis indicates that mean seed yield of sesame genotypes was ranged from 220 kg ha-1 to 1065 kg ha-1 across environments. Seed yielding potential of Assacc- 64 and Ass-acc-29 reached about 1100 kg ha-1-1400 kg ha-1 and 1200-1400 kg ha-1 respectively. Ass-acc-64 and Ass-acc-29 were high seed yielding genotypes with combined mean seed yield of 715 kg ha-1 and 706 kg ha-1 respectively. Minimum bacterial blight disease severity was recorded on high yielding genotypes Ass-acc-64 (24.76%) and Ass-acc-29 (30.86%). Therefore, Ass-acc-64 and Ass-acc-29 are proposed as candidate variety based on their seed yielding performance and resistance against bacterial blight. However, temporal deviation in productivity of sesame genotypes indicates that achieving high and stable seed yield in sesame needs interdisciplinary research.
