Rice landraces from haor areas of Bangladesh possess greater genetic diversity as revealed by morpho-molecular approaches along with grain quality traits

Abstract

Haors are slightly depressed bowl or saucer-shaped wetland ecosystems, between the natural levees of rivers flowing into sea. Landraces are locally adapted germplasms, often with and have valuable traits. Genetically diverse germplasm is a valuable resource for the crop improvement programme. Therefore, the genetic diversity of 40 rice landraces from haor areas in Bangladesh was assessed through phenotyping and genotyping. Significant variability was found for several agronomic traits at p ≤ 0.01. Lal paijam was the earliest maturing genotype (130 days) with the lowest yield (8 g/plant). Lal kumri was the best genotype suited to haor lands due to its medium earliness (144 days) and the highest yield (30 g/plant). The genotypes were grouped using phenotypic or genotypic traits into five clusters. The first five principal components with eigenvalue of >1.0 were responsible for a cumulative variance of 72.9% in which principal components (PC); PC1, PC2, PC3, PC4, and PC5 contributed 25.7%, 19.2%, 10.9%, 8.8%, and 8.3%, respectively. A sum of 80 alleles was observed at 6 Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) loci specifying the range of allele number from 11 (RM 169) to 16 (RM 25) with an average of 14.17. The mean values of polymorphism information content and gene diversity were 0.859 and 0.871, respectively. Most of the genotypes exhibited medium grain size and shape, intermediate gelatinization temperature, and intermediate amylose content. The findings of this study can be exploited to develop early, high-yielding rice varieties with premium grain quality.