A B S T R A C TFolate is an essential micronutrient in human diet and its deficiency causes neural tube defects, coronary heart disease and certain forms of cancer, impaired cognitive functions. Humans depend on plant based sources for this nutrient. Rice is a major staple food but unfortunately with low folate content when compared to other plant based foods. Hence, screening and evaluation of available rice germplasm accessions for folate content is the basic step to identify folate rich accessions for further studies. In the present study, folate was extracted by a modified tri-enzyme treatment and assayed using HPLC C18 columns with a UV detector at 280 nm. The mean folate content of unpolished brown rice in 150 accessions were investigated and the results ranged from 9.721 µg/100 g to 29.284 µg/100 g revealing a three-fold difference between the lowest and highest values. Twelve lines had recorded significantly higher folate content (>20 µg/100 g), 136 lines had moderate (11 to 20 µg/100 g) and two lines had registered low level of folate (<10 µg/100 g). Cluster analysis revealed that, 150 accessions were grouped into three clusters at the similarity coefficient of 1.7. Cluster I consisted of five accessions viz., RG1 (Mapillai Samba), RG2 (CK275), RG3 (Senkar), RG4 (Murugankar) and RG162 (IR 64) with high folate range of 27.263 to 29.284 µg/100 g of sample. Cluster II consisted of 12 accessions in total with two sub clusters. Cluster III also comprised of two sub clusters in which, sub cluster I had 123 accessions with moderate level of folate content (12.516 -18.603 µg/100 g) and the remaining 10 genotypes in sub cluster II had genotypes with lower values. These results suggested that accessions from high and low folate pool can be utilized in recombination breeding to enhance the level of folate and also to map the genomic regions associated with high folate content.

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