Genetic evaluation of rice (Oryza sativa. l) genotypes for yield and nutritional quality traits

Abstract

The increase in food production is greatly contributed by green revolution, thereby leading to reduction in people’s starvation. However, this caused greater depletion of micronutrient reserve in soil and thereby accentuated wide spread deficiencies of micronutrients in crop species. Hence, biofortification program has been initiated to identify varieties having high iron and zinc along with high yield. In the present study 46 rice genotypes along with 4 checks were received from Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR), Hyderabad, India and were evaluated for yield and yield attributing traits, grain quality parameters and estimation of micronutrients.For yield and yield attributing characters most of the traits showed high heritability associated with high genetic advance indicating fixation of genes and presence of additive gene action in these traits. The results obtained by micronutrient estimation revealed that iron and zinc contents of dehusked grains differed significantly between the genotypes. Among various studied genotypes the promising genotypes with highest grain iron and zinc content along with higher yields and with intermediate amylose content were identified. These promising genotypes identified can be released to farmers after testing in multilocation trials for their stable performance or they can be used as parents in hybridization programme.