Conferring Drought Tolerance in Rice Landraces Using Seedling Indices

Landraces are a vital source of genetic diversity in crops, offering a rich pool of allelic variation that plant breeders can utilize for developing new cultivars. Although, Nepal has a huge diversity for rice landraces but their actual potentiality hasn’t been sufficiently explored yet. In this study, 25 rice landraces were tested to evaluate the drought tolerance level in completely randomized design (CRD) in 250 ml disposable cup at seedling stage. The rice landraces were tested under 60% FC, 100% FC, and saturated condition for ten quantitative traits. The analysis of variance suggested that there is a significant difference among the landraces for different root and shoot traits as well as in different moisture conditions. Correlation analysis showed that root length has significant positive correlation with shoot length, root: shoot ratio, and fresh root weight under drought condition with 60% FC. Similarly, negative correlation was observed between root: shoot ratio and root number under drought condition. However, germination percentage didn’t show discrimination over any moisture conditions. Principal component analysis showed positive connection of root length and root: shoot ratio towards 60% FC. While strong connection was observed between shoot length, fresh weight, dry weight and root number towards 100% FC and saturated condition. It was found that, Manamurey showed better performance under all studied traits but more insightful result can be obtained by further assessing at vegetative and reproductive stage respectively.