Agro-morphological characterization and morphology based genetic diversity analysis of landraces of rice variety (oryza sativa l.) of bankura district of West bengal

An investigation was conducted to determine the agro-morphic characterization and relationship between 20 landraces of rice cultivars of Bankura District of West Bengal. Characterization for 20 qualitative and 13 quantitative morphological characters with 82 agro-morphic descriptors was carried out. Most traits were polymorphic except coleoptiles colour, present of leaf collar, shape of ligule and present of secondary branching in panicle. For Cluster analysis of qualitative traits the cultivars were grouped into five clusters based on similarity coefficient of Jaccard. Pearson correlation matrix, Principal Component Analysis (Pearson –n type), the un-weighted variable pair group method of the average linkage cluster analysis (UPGMA-Person) were used to analyzed quantitative data. This analysis enabled assessment of major characters of landraces variety which have a great impact to the diversity of landraces. Using UPGMA four cluster groups were obtained from 13 quantitative agro-morphological characters. The first three principal components explained about 79.05% of the total variation among the 13 characters. The results of PCA suggested that characters such as leaf length and width ratio, plant height, grain width, decorticated grain width, 50% flowering and maturity time were the principal discriminatory characteristics of landraces of rice variety. Germplasm consist of these characters are better choice for hybridization program. The present study indicated that morphological traits were useful for preliminary evaluation for crop improvement program and can be used for assessing genetic diversity among morphologically distinguishable rice landraces.