Bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl.) is cucurbitaceous vegetable crop having chromosome number 2n=22. It is one of the important cucurbits in India, both as rainy and summer season vegetable. The fresh fruit has light green smooth skin and white flesh. The genus Lagenaria included six species that are distributed in Africa, Madagascar, Indo- Malaysia and the neotropics. There is only one cultivated species, Lagenaria siceraria, which is an annual and monoecious. The five other species are wild, perennial and dioecious, occurring in east Africa and Madagascar. Five wild species of Lagenaria exist in Africa: L. breviflora (Benth.), L. abyssinica, L. rufa, L. sphaerica and L. guineensis. It was also observed that L. siceraria germplasm is more diverse than its wild relatives viz. L. sphaerica, L. abyssinica and L. breviflora for qualitative and quantitative traits. The variability for various characters was found wide in Europe, India and Japan (Badade et al., 2001; Saito et al., 2008; Kumar et al., 2011; Schlumbaum and Vandorpe, 2012). Wild species produce small round fruits with strong bitter taste (Morimoto et al. 2005). Lagenaria siceraria (Mol.) Standl. commonly known as white-flowered gourd, Doodhi, Lauki (Hindi), Kadoo (Marathi) which is official in Ayurvedic Pharmacopoeia. It is one of the excellent fruit crops for human being gifted by the nature that have all of the essential constituents that are required for normal and good health (Habibur, 2003). In India, the total area covered under bottle gourd is 0.223 million ha with production of 3.72 million tonnes and its productivity is 16.68 tonnes per ha. (Anonymous, 2023-24). The tender fruits of bottle gourd can be used as a vegetable or for making sweets (e.g. Halva, kheer, petha and burfi), kofta and pickles. The fruit is rich in pectin also, which showed good prospects for jelly preparation, and the dried shells of mature fruits are hard and are used as containers, utensils, musical instruments or ornamental items. The edible portion of fruit contains 96.3 per cent moisture, 2.9 per cent carbohydrates, 0.2 per cent protein, 0.1 per cent fat, 0.5 per cent mineral matter and 11 mg of vitamin C per 100 g fresh weight (Thamburaj and Singh, 2018). The bottle gourd has lot of variation for different morphological characters like fruit bearing capacity, fruit girth, fruit length, length of main shoot, number of branches per plant, number of seeds per fruit, seed weight, seed length, seed breadth, seed shape and seed colour (Decker-Walters et al., 2004; Morimoto et al., 2005; Clarke et al., 2006, Achigan- Dako et al., 2008 and Yetisir et al., 2008).