Classification of morphological, agronomic and special grain quality characters among highland purple rice landraces from Northern Thailand

Abstract

Purple rice landraces are valuable genetic resources due to being source of considerable amount of genetic diversity. This study aimed to classify highland purple rice landraces from Northern Thailand including of 37 purple rice landrace accessions and 9 check varieties using 19 morphological and agronomic traits and 4 special grain qualities i.e., anthocyanin, gamma oryzonal, iron (Fe) and zinc (Zn) concentration. The results showed that purple rice landraces had different shade of the purple pigmentation among plant parts and accessions. Most of purple rice accessions exhibited green color on their plant part, being large grain shape and glutinous endosperm type ( about 65%, 80% and 95%, respectively). Purple rice accessions were different significantly in all agronomic and grain quality characters. There were acccesisons with higher anthocyanin and gamma oryzanol than KDK for 2 and 3 accesions, respectively.Only one accession had higher Zn concentration than the check variety HN but, all purple rice landraces had lower grain Fe concentration than the check variety KH-CMU. The agglomerative cluster analysis based on the 23 characters revealed that 46 purple rice accession were clustered into 2 main groups and 5 sub-groups. The results of this study indicated that there were morphological, agronomic and grain quality variation among purple rice landraces from highland of northern Thailand. The accessions with high nutritional value will be useful for rice improvement program in the future.