Correlation analysis of polygenic traits of rice under salinity stress

Abstract

Salinity is a major issue affecting rice production. To address this emerging issue, an experiment was conducted using a Completely Randomized Design (CRD) with three replicates under three salt treatments: 1.2 dS/m, 8 dS/m, and 12 dS/m Data were recorded for the traits like plant height (PH), tiller per plant (TPP), panicle length (PL), total spike length (TSL), grain per panicle (GPP), days to flowering (DTF), 1000 grain weight (TGW), root length (RL), root dry weight  (RDW), and shoot dry weight (SDW). Recorded data was subjected to Analysis of Variances (ANOVA) study which shows that a significant amount of variation was present among the recorded data. A correlation study also revealed that grain per panicle showed a significantly positive correlation with thousand grain weight (0.79**), panicle length (0.29**), tiller per plant (0.30**), root length (0.21**) while it showed negatively significant correlation root dry weight (-0.42**) under normal condition. Under salinity condition (T1) grain per panicle showed a significantly positive correlation day to flowering (0.63**), thousand grain weight (0.85**), panicle length (0.33**), tiller per plant (0.33**), shoot dry weight (0.50**) with it showed negatively significant correlation with root dry weight (-0.48**). Under salinity level (T2) grain per panicle showed passively significant correlation with panicle length (0.32**), tiller per plant (0.34**), root length (0.36**) indicating potential pathways for improving yield in rice. The G10 (NIAB IRRI-9), G5 (PAK-386) and G13 (KSK-434) were found to be salt tolerant genotypes because they performed better for most of the traits under study while G4 (KISSAN BASMATI), G15 (PAK 2021) and G25 (K-134) were found to be salt susceptible genotypes as they performed significantly poor for most of study traits. The best performing germplasm under salt stress can be a desirable genotype for future breeding programs and early selection criteria for generating high yielding according to the findings.