GENETIC CHARACTERIZATION OF LOCAL RICE (Oryza sativa L.) GENOTYPES AT MORPHOLOGICAL AND MOLECULAR LEVEL USING SSR MARKERS

Current study was conducted to estimate the genetic diversity of 29 local rice cultivars including 3 checks at both morphological and molecular level during Kharif 2017 in an augmented design.Significant results obtained from ANOVA of 29 genotypes for 16 quantitative traits; Mahalanobis' D 2 grouped the total genotypes into 6 clusters.Highest inter-cluster distance was found between clusters III and VI indicating the genotypes in these clusters are most diverse.The SSR banding pattern revealed a total of 65 alleles from 21 polymorphic markers across 29 rice genotypes with an average of 3.09 alleles.The polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranged from 0.701 (RM 277) to 0.346 (RM237) with a mean value of 0.571 showing the marker RM277 as best based on the above study.The dendrogram analysis revealed all the 29 genotypes were grouped into two main clusters i.e. cluster I and cluster II with dissimilarity coefficient 0.36.Both the clusters were further divided into two groups each of which are further divide into two sub-groups each.Based on the genetic distances and the dissimilarity coefficient obtained from both morphological and molecular analysis, genotypes like Bahubali, Golden 105, Pusa 1121, HUR-1301, RK-2 Lal kasturi and Pan 815 can be selected and used as parents due to their greater diversity.Knowledge of genetic diversity available within a population at both morphological and molecular level helps the breeder to formulate a successful hybridization programme and gain good results.