Estimating the genotype by environment interaction among diverse rice genotypes identified under artificial conditions

Abstract

The aim of this study was to estimate the genotype by environment interaction of artificially identified cold tolerant rice genotypes in the highland cooler parts of Uganda. The best twenty three cold tolerant genotypes and two susceptible genotypes were evaluated in seven environments, which were characterized by cold weather. Five by five alpha lattice design with three replications was used in each environment. Analysis of variance revealed significant GEI effect in most of the cold tolerance indicator traits. Leaf wilting score was one of the major measures of cold stress observed on evaluated genotypes and it was chosen for demonstration of AMMI ANOVA and GGE-biplot. AMMI analysis showed there were highly significant environments, genotypes and GEI effects on leaf wilting score. The partitioning of total sum of squares (TSS) revealed that the environment effect was a predominant source of variation followed by GEI and genotype. The first two PCA on GGE-biplot explain 72.72% of the total variation of GEI. In general, rice genotypes SCRID091-20-2-2-4-4, MET P9, MET P40, NERICA 1 and GIZA 177 took short duration to mature, had better yield and were cold tolerant in most of test environments.