Characterization of some Agronomic Traits and Salinity Tolerance Indices Under Normal and Saline Soil Conditions in Rice

Abstract

Salinity is one of the major factors responsible for crop yield losses in the world. Genetic improvement for salt tolerance becomes an urgent task to cope with the salinity rice problem. In order to evaluate the presence of variability for desirable traits and correlations under both normal and salinity stress conditions, thirty genotypes of rice were evaluated in the two successive rice seasons of 2020 and 2021. The results showed highly significant for all studied traits for the genotype (G), and L x G. The heaviest panicle and highest number of spikelets per panicle were recorded for the promising lines, RGA-2, RGA-3, RGA-4 and RGA-14. Under normal location, RGA-2, RGA-3, RGA-6, RGA-9 and RGA-14 revealed the high yielding, while under saline location, RGA-13 and RGA-14 showed the highest yields compared with the salinity tolerance check Giza178. The salinity yield indices, SSI and TOL gave the same trend approximately for thirty genotypes, whereas, the salinity susceptible genotypes resulted in the highest values, while the salinity tolerance genotypes recorded the lowest values. Using mean performances and salinity tolerance indices for the screening of salinity tolerant genotypes exhibited that Giza178, Giza179, RGA-2, RGA-3, RGA-4, RGA-11, RGA-13, RGA-14 and RGA-15 were tolerant to salinity stress.