Morphological Characters and Yield Performance of Six Accessions of Sri Lankan Traditional Rice Variety "Mudukiri Al"

Sri Lankan traditional rice germplasm consists of varieties with a wide variation in morphology. One rice variety is comprised of many accessions. Determination of morphological variation and yield potential among accessions within the same variety would be useful for breeding new varieties and farmer introductions. Six accessions of Mudukiri Al, a short aged and red grained traditional rice variety were grown in completely randomized design and tested for nineteen morphological and yield traits including days to flowering (DF), plant height at flowering (PH), leaf area (LA), culm number (CN), total number of panicles (FT), number of secondary branches per panicle (NSB), number of spikelets per first panicle (NSP), grain length (GL) and grain width (GW) that showed significant differences among accessions. Four principal components resulted from Principal Component analysis accounted for 95.716 % of the total variation. The accession 4144 having significantly higher LA (44.4 cm2 ± 2.158), CN (38 ± 7.25), NSP (255 ± 15.34) and NSB (28 ± 4.58) was individually clustered, which could be a candidate in future breeding programmes. Significant relationships between quantitative vegetative and yield characters were observed. Delayed flowering time increased the vegetative growth and reduced the grain size suggesting a common relationship model between the DF and vegetative and yield components among the tested accessions