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Thesis Issued 2026-09-08 EN

Feasibility Of Rapid Generation Advance

Author: M. Eunus
Plant Breeding

Abstract

To investigate whether or not basic vegetative phase (bvp) and photoperiod sensitive phase (PSP) interact, the relation between these two characters was studied. It was found to be linear but the regression coefficient varied with the nature of sensitivity of the parents and crosses involved. A significant relation existed between PSP and bvp for photoperiod-sensitive parents whereas no such relation existed for photoperiod-insensitive parents. For F2 data, all crosses showed significant interaclion with the highest slope within a set of crosses being associated with photoperiod-sensitive plants only. The greater separation in the bvp means occurred as the bv mean for photoperiod sensitive plants increased with the increased PSP and intermediate bvp in each cross. The mean broad sense heritability for PSP and bvp was found to be 84.88% and 77.87%, respectively and the genetic advance for PSP and BVP was also 13.99% and 2.14%, respectively. This indicate that these characters were complexly inherited. 1/ Post-doctoral Fellow and Plant Breeder (Former), respectively. The International Rice Research Institute, Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines. It is of vital interest for rice breeders to estimate the recovery ratio of photoperiod sensitive plants in the hybrid populations resulting from the crosses of photoperiod sensitive varieties with photoperiod insensitive varieties. And it is assumed that such hybrid populations are able to be harvested in a shorter period in the rapid generation advance. Theoretically, there should be fairly high frequency of photoperiod-sensitive genes in such crosses regardless of tne degree of basic vegetative growth, but the recovery of the photoperiod sensitive plants seems sometimes scarce and complicated (Ahnad, 1978). Therefore, a question arises whether there is any interaction between the length of basic vegetative growth and photoperiod sensitivity in the expression of the total growth duration. This point was looked into in detail by evaluating the recovery of photcperiod sensitive plants in hybrid populations which covers various combinations of photoperiod-sensitive rices of different origin and varying length of the basic vegetative growth. MATERIALS AND METHODS Three phctoperiod-sensitive cultivars namely, Lemo, Leb Muе Nahng 111 (IMN 1ll) and FTB 33 £rom Indonesia, Thailand and South India, respectively, were crossed to three photoperiod-insensitive varieties, IR32, IR34, and IR36 with varying length of basic vegetative phase, and one photoperiod-sensitive cultivar, Sulai from Sri Lanka. Thus a set of 12 cross-combinations were studied. F1 and F2 seeds of 12 crosses along with their respective parents were grown both under short daylength (8 hours) and natural daylength during the period from May 13 through November 1978. The materials were grown under natural daylength were the first tillers of each individual plant grown under short daylength in Phytotron under same temperature regime (day/night temperature 29/21°C). Plastic cups filled with soil and placed on shallow iron boxes was the medium for growing. The cups on each iron boxes were surrounded and supported by soil. The soil of each cup was taken from soil stock fertilized with each of solophos and muriate of potash at the rate of 2 g/4 kg soil. Then after 7 days of germination 0.1 g of ammonium sulphate was applied/cup/week till booting stage. The procedure followed for planting the materials of each cross under study were 4 for each male, female and Fl plants plus 60 F2 plants per cart. For each ciuss? carts were assigned for each treatment, that is, 2 carts under short daylength and 2 carts under natural daylength. of the The major records were taken on the growth duration plants from seeding to flowering. The basic vegetative phase was estimated by the number of days required by the main culm from seeding to panicle initiation under 8 hours photoperiod. The date of panicle initiation was obtained by subtracting 35 days from the date of panicle emergence (Vergara et al., 1966). The photoperiod sensitive phase (PSP) was calculated by subtracting the number of days required for flowering under short day of 8 hours from the number of days required for flowering under natural daylength. Heritability in broad sense (h2B) was estimated both for bvp and PSP by the method of Mahmud and Kramer (1951), in which the F2 was used as the phenotypic variance and the square root of the product of the parental variances (geometric mean) was taken as the environmental variance, was also used. The calculations may be represented symbolically as follows: Heritability (h2B) VF,VP. Vp2 VF2 Vp VE VG Vp Vp The symbols Vp, VG and VE mean phenotypic, genotypic and environ mental variance, respectively. The genetic advance ( G) in percent of the mean(s) was calculated both for bvp and PSP using the formula of Empig et al. (1970) as shown below: G=KF2( $2) . H Σ where K= 2.06 (5% selection intensity) X= mean of the F2 population VF2 = variance of F2 H= heritability (broad sense)