Diversity analysis for cooking quality traits in North-East Indian rice landraces

In North Eastern India, rice is the most common food consumed. Many different rice cultivars have been developed over the past 60 years. The dynamic variations in grain quality improvement among the main cultivars have seldom been the subject of investigation. The study assessed 20 rice landraces for eight variables related to cooking quality to identify various genotypes for potential breeding programme and to determine the minimum number of components that can best explain the total diversity. Out of the eight PCs, three PCs exhibited more than 1.0 eigen values and exhibited 78.71 % total variability among the characters. KBAC, CLBR, KLBR and KB were associated with PC I, which explained 37.11% of the overall variance. From the cluster analysis, the 20 rice landraces were divided into seven different groups. Between cluster VII and III and between cluster VII and V there was maximum inter- cluster divergence, indicating that the genotypes found in these clusters were genetically more distinct from one another than genotypes found in any other cluster. Landraces including Dhansiri, Phourin Nakuppi, Moniram, Ranjit, Mahsuri, Chakhao Sempak and Disang were found to be genetically divergent and would produce prospective segregating populations that may be employed as source materials for improving quality attributes through appropriate selection, according to the inter-cluster distances.