Vol. 12, Issue 9 (2023)

Author(s):
Gyanisha Nayak, Nairita Vaidya, Madhuchhanda Parida, Jawahar Lal Katara, Parameswaran C, Sanghamitra Samantaray and Prabharani Chaudhari

Abstract:
The availability of genetic diversity for particular traits in populations is important for both development of crop improvement programmes and implementation of suitable selection methods. The current study is aimed at exploring the genetic variability present among 339 rice genotypes during kharif-2022 using augmented design. With the exception of chaffy grains/panicle, biomass yield/plant and seed yield/plant all the characters under study showed a minimal impact of the environment on the expression of the character with small differences between the GCV and PCV. High heritability and genetic advance were observed for all the characters except biomass yield/plant, chaffy grains/panicle and spikelet fertility suggesting presence of high variability among the genotypes and additive gene action. In PCA, the first six principal components (PC1 to PC6) with eigenvalues larger than 1 were found to account for 80.767% of the variation in all attributes analysed. Traits such as; flag leaf area, biomass yield/plant, total grains/panicle, filled grains/panicle, seed yield/plant, panicles/plant, and total tillers/plant were discovered to be important characters contributing to variability through the use of variable biplot analysis. Therefore, by using direct phenotypic selection, these traits can be improved and used in selection programmes.