COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF SELECTED EXOTIC HYBRID RICE (Oryza sativa L.) BASED ON QUANTITATIVE TRAITS ANALYSIS

Abstract

In the plant breeding program, significance and nature of genetic diversity plays a pivotal role in identifying a suitable cultivar for its further improvement. The present study was conducted to compare and analyse the contributions of yield components to grain yield of twenty-one exotic hybrid rice genotypes under field conditions, and evaluate the relationships between 11 grain yield and its components of hybrid rice to identify the suitable cultivars. The principal component analysis showed that the first three components were significant with eigenvalue more than 1 and contributed 50.74%, 16.32% and 11.14% of the total variance, respectively. PC1 included the traits that were related mostly to the plant height (cm), effective tillers, panicle length (cm), grain width (cm), 1000 grain weight (g) and grain yield (t ha -1 ). Cultivars from Heera-2, Qyou-6, SHD-661, Q-5, Q-28, HS-366 performed well in PC1 while cultivars such as HS-558B, T-35, Xiang-11, Lyongyou-5, RXEL-16, RXME-22 performed well in PC2. The cluster analysis grouped the cultivars into three main clusters in which 14 cultivars were grouped into cluster I. And cluster I showed the highest mean value for plant height, panicle length, filled grain with moderate high rate of