DIALLEL-SAS05: A comprehensive program for Griffing's 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 much-improved 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 users' needs for various diallel-cross design experiments. DIALLEL-SAS05 has major advantages over DIALLEL-SAS in that: (i) it analyzes not only all four Griffing's diallel methods (both fixed and random models), but it also computes Gardner-Eberhart's Analyses 11 and 111; (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 (sigma(2)(g)) anti SCA (sigma(2)(s)) variances, which can be used to estimate additive (sigma(2)(A)) and dominance (sigma(2)(D)) variances, and ultimately narrow-sense heritability (h(2)). 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 researchers' efficiency in analyzing and interpreting diallel-cross data. The program code is available on a CD from the corresponding author.