GENETIC STUDIES ON BIODIVERSITY AND EVOLUTION IN RICE

Abstract

A set of two hundred and fifty-eight rice accessions divided into five groups were evaluated under normal and stress conditions. The study was divided into two parts: 1) Assessment of genetic biodiversity, which include phenotypic evaluation, genetic parameters, correlation coefficient estimation and morphological clustering for all the studied accessions. 2) Estimation of the genetic structure and divergence by utilizing marker assisted selection (MAS), SSRs to tag favorable QTLs, molecular profiling for establishing phylogenic tree to detect the origin/evolution among all the tested accessions. Eight primers (RM 315, RM 318, RM 166, RM 302, RM 201, RM 234, RM 526 and RM 144) revealed different levels of polymorphism to tag the related traits of interest as tolerant to abiotic stress, resistant to biotic stress and yield-related traits. Two primers (RM 190 and RM 278) were monomorphic. The percentage of the polymorphism was nearly 80 %. The size of detected fragments ranged from 105–325 bp. A total of 186 bands were scored from the amplification products with the ten SSR primers. Genetic diversity analyses were conducted on the basis of the scores with 176 unique bands. Phylogenic tree for the fifteen selected rice accessions from each group were established according to the molecular data and based on ten SSRs.