'Plant Breeding: Sustaining the Future' Abstracts of the XVIth EUCARPIA Congress, Edinburgh, Scotland, 10-14 September 2001 THE BIOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE OF PEPPER (CAPSICUM ANNUM L.) FRUIT P. NOWACZYK, L. NOWACZYK Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, University of Technology and Agriculture, Bernardynska 6, 85-029 Bygoszcz, Poland

The pepper fruit consists of pericarp, placenta with seeds and pulpyy calyx sepals. In Capsicum annuum L. The pericarp is eatable only.  The remaining elements of fruit are useless ballast.  The share of pericarp in the weight of the whole fruit means biological performance.  This feature is very important in quality valuation of cultivars in processing industry.  Higher biological performance of fruit makes the production more effective.  The biological material of our investigations differs in this case, and the highest level we have got as a result of breeding reached 91%.  The results like this have been obtained in the group of large-fruit lines.  In our opinion the realisation of this breeding direction is very important in a quality pepper improvement.