Yield-enhancing heterotic QTL transferred from wild species to cultivated rice Oryza sativa L

Abstract

Utilization of "hidden genes" from wild species has emerged as a novel option for enrichment of genetic diversity for productivity traits. In rice we have generated more than 2000 lines having introgression from 'A' genome-donor wild species of rice in the genetic background of popular varieties PR114 and Pusa44 were developed. Out of these, based on agronomic acceptability, 318 lines were used for developing rice hybrids to assess the effect of introgressions in heterozygous state. These introgression lines and their recurrent parents, possessing fertility restoration ability for wild abortive (WA) cytoplasm, were crossed with cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) line PMS17A to develop hybrids. Hybrids developed from recurrent parents were used as checks to compare the performance of 318 hybrids developed by hybridizing alien introgression lines with PMS17A. Seventeen hybrids expressed a significant increase in yield and its component traits over check hybrids. These 17 hybrids were re-evaluated in large-size replicated plots. Of these, four hybrids, viz., ILH299, ILH326, ILH867 and ILH901, having introgressions from O. rufipogon and two hybrids (ILH921 and ILH951) having introgressions from O. nivara showed significant heterosis over parental introgression line, recurrent parents and check hybrids for grain yield-related traits. Alien introgressions were detected in the lines taken as male parents for developing six superior hybrids, using a set of 100 polymorphic simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers. Percent introgression showed a range of 2.24 from in O. nivara to 7.66 from O. rufipogon. The introgressed regions and their putative association with yield components in hybrids is reported and discussed.

Figure 1. Development of alien introgression lines.

Figure 2. Development of Test and Check hybrids.

Figure 3. Field photograph of IL921 (left), ILH921 (middle) and on right hand side showing panicle characteristics.

Figure 4. Graphical genotypes of six alien introgression lines generated after analyzing these with polymorphic SSR markers.

Regions in blue are homozygous alien segments and gray are heterozygous alien segments introgressed from O. rufipogon in IL299, IL326, IL867 and IL901 and O. nivara in IL901 and IL951. Numbers on the right of linkage group are the cM distances as per Temnykh et al . Numbers at the bottom are the chromosomes. Details of the ILHs in parentheses are presented in Table 1.