Title : Unlocking genetic diversity: Morphological characterization of Ghanaian rice accessions
Abstract:
Rice exhibits tremendous genetic diversity, offering opportunities for crop improvement. However, genebank-conserved accessions in Ghana remain underutilized in breeding programs. To address this, 54 rice germplasm accessions from Ghana's Genebank were characterized using Bioversity International's morphological descriptors. Multivariate analyses, including principal component (PC) and hierarchical cluster analyses, were performed on 17 quantitative traits. The principal component analysis revealed that PC1-PC5 explained 77% of the variation, accounting for 21.015%, 20.226%, 17.011%, 9.552%, and 9.25% of the variance, respectively. Key discriminatory characters included yield, fertility index, panicle length, panicle fertility, effective tillers, and number of tillers. Notably, nine genotypes (GH1573 F, GH1512 F, GH2090, GH1531 F, GH9055, GH1599 F, GH1575 F, GH1514 F, and GH1574 F) exhibited superior fertility index and effective tiller performance. Four accessions (GH1588, GH2148, GH1579, and GH1535) showed high panicle fertility, while three (GH574, GH1837, and GH1533) demonstrated high tillering ability. Cluster analysis classified the 54 accessions into three major groups. Six accessions (GH1581, GH1541, GH1522, GH1521, GH2085, and GH2151) grouped with popular varieties AGRARice and Jasmine 85, exhibiting desirable traits like yield, grain weight, and panicle length. This study provides valuable information for the conservation and selection of parental lines in rice breeding programs.
Keywords: Rice germplasm, Genebank conservation, Genetic diversity, Morphological characterization, Multivariate analysis
