Luffa cylindrica [L.] Roem., known as sponge gourd, belongs to the Cucurbitaceae family and the present investigation, conducted with 48 sponge gourd genotypes, aimed to evaluate various horticultural traits at the Department of Vegetable Science, Horticultural College and Research Institute, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University in Coimbatore. The experimental results exhibited significant differences among the genotypes evaluated, with a higher PCV compared to the GCV, suggesting that environmental factors strongly influence the expression of these characters. The high heritability, coupled with high genetic advance, was observed for most characters studied, indicating that they are primarily controlled by additive gene action. This suggests that selection based on these characters would be effective for identifying suitable genotypes. The correlation study among various traits showed the highest positive significant association for the weight of individual fruit (0.86), followed by the number of fruits per vine (0.67) and fruit diameter (0.45). With fruit yield per vine as the designating trait, these traits were identified as the most important yield determinant characters. Principal Component Analysis revealed that days to first male flower anthesis, days to first female flower anthesis, node bearing first male flower and node bearing first female flower components exhibited with an eigenvalue of unity and accounting for 67.91 % of total variance. Characters with positive values in each PC are the important yield-determining characters and hence, all these characters can be well relied upon for the selection of a suitable genotype.
