EN
Application of molecular markers makes the selection process much more effective. Marker assisted selection is an important tool for plant breeders to increase the efficiency of a breeding process, especially for multigenic traits, highly influenced by the environment. Epistasis is the interaction between alleles from two or more loci determining the complex traits, and thus plays an important role in the development of quantitative traits of crops. In this paper, the relationships between RAPD marker-by-marker interactions and 22 quantitative traits of caraway (Carum carvi L.) were analyzed. Significant associations of 116 epistatic markers with at least one trait in 2004 as well as 112 in 2005 were found on the basis of multivariate regression analysis. The proportion of total phenotypic variances of individual trait explained by the marker-by-marker interactions ranged from 25.3% to 96.0%.