Abstract
Rice cultivation in Africa suffers from various biotic and abiotic constraints. The African rice, Oryza glaberrima, is a potential source of useful genes for resistance to a range of these stresses. The development of interspecific varieties based on crosses between the high yielding cultivated Asian rice species (Oryza sativa) and O. glaberrima showed some gaps in the resistance compared to O. glaberrima. In order to valorize its genetic potential, intraspecific lines were developed using three O. glaberrima lines Tog5681, Tog5672 and Tog7291 as parents. Phenotypic evaluation of the progeny (total of 55 F6 lines) and checks (O. glaberrima and O. sativa) using 18 quantitative characters, showed a higher degree of variation in plant height, leaf dimensions, panicle fertility and grain weight. Based on the discriminating characters proposed here for further exploitation, intraspecific lines were grouped into five clusters, two of which (G4 and G5) contained the best lines for vegetative (G4) and productive (G5) characters.
Highlights
Rice is one of the main stands of global food security and has been one of the main focuses of international research for several decades
We evaluated, through agro-morphological characterization, these intra-specific lines which are adapted to the irrigated lowland cropping system
The intra-specific O. glaberrima evaluated displayed a considerable variation for the measured quantitative characters
Summary
Rice is one of the main stands of global food security and has been one of the main focuses of international research for several decades It is a staple food of about half of the world’s population living in Asia and Africa, providing 40 to 70% of their total food calories. The estimated annual global rice production was about million tons in 2008 and million tons in 2009 on about 149 million hectares (FAO, 2009) Despite this strong growth in production, there is a growing demand for rice mainly due to demographic increase, rapid urbanization, increased proportion of rice in the population’s diet, especially those of Africans and new end-users (livestock feed, breweries, processors and agri-business farmers etc.). About 80% of small-scale rice farmers, generally poor, contribute to the world’s rice production primarily to increase their incomes and satisfy their family needs, and to improve human consumption and his health well-being (FAO, 2004)
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