HERITABILITY OF FLORAL TRAITS ESTIMATED WITH REGRESSION FOR Jaltomata procumbens (Solanaceae)

Narrow-sense heritability was estimated for eight morphological traits of one species by regressing F1 mean trait values on midparent trait values. Parents and F1 plants of Jaltomata procumbens, a neotropical herbaceous perennial with bee-pollinated actinomorphic flowers, were grown in a greenhouse. The seeds sown to grow the parent generation were collected from geographically widespread populations. Estimates of heritability presented in this study are likely biased upward by disassortative mating and, consequently, corrected heritabilities are presented as the slope from regression divided by one plus the Pearson correlation coefficient. All eight floral traits (flowers per inflorescence, sepal and petal length, extent of petal spots, staminal length, extent of staminal filament pubescence, anther length, and stigma diameter) have corrected heritabilities ranging from 0.24 for flowers per inflorescence to 1.0 for the extent of filament pubescence, and thus for J. procumbens the traits studied retain the ability to respond to selection if there is genetic exchange among populations.