ASSOCIATION BETWEEN PLANT ARCHITECTURE OF THE BEAN PLANT AND SEED SIZE

The widest use of technology in bean culture in Brazil has required cu ltivars to present more upright architecture. However, every available cultivated material which showed that sort of architecture, possesses small seeds which have less commercial acceptance. For this reason, t his work was conducted over the period from February 1993 to November 1994, to verify whether there is any association between these two tra its. For this goal, the F-2, F-3, F-4 and F-5 generations from the cro sses Milionario x Flor de Mayo, EMGOPA 201-Ouro x Manteigao Fosco 11 a nd Rio Vermelho x Roxo PV were used. The screening experiments of the F-3, F-4 and F-5 families were carried out at the Universidade Federal de Lavras, in Lavras, MG, Brazil. This latter generation was also eva luated at Patos de Minas, MG, Brazil. The results obtained showed that the existence of correlation between the score of architecture and yi eld was not found, but a general bias of positive association between the weight of 100 seeds and yield was verified. In an overall way, no association between the architecture score and the seed weight was obs erved, showing to be possible to select upright plants with any seed s ize. However, the frequency of upright architecture families (score in ferior to 3) and 100 seeds weight above 25 grams was very low.