Marker Assisted Breeding to Develop Multiple Stress Tolerant Varieties for Flood and Drought Prone Areas

Abstract

Background Climate extremes such as drought and flood have become major constraints to the sustainable rice crop productivity in rainfed environments. Availability of suitable climate-resilient varieties could help farmers to reduce the grain yield losses resulting from the climatic extremities. The present study was undertaken with an aim to develop high-yielding drought and submergence tolerant rice varieties using marker assisted introgression of qDTY 1.1 , qDTY 2.1 , qDTY 3.1 and Sub1. Performance of near isogenic lines (NILs) developed in the background of Swarna was evaluated across 60 multi-locations trials (MLTs). The selected promising lines from MLTs were nominated and evaluated in national trials across 18 locations in India and 6 locations in Nepal. Results Grain yield advantage of the NILs with qDTY 1.1 + qDTY 2.1 + qDTY 3.1 + Sub1 and qDTY 2.1 + qDTY 3.1 + Sub1 ranged from 76 to 2479 kg ha − 1 and 396 to 2376 kg ha − 1 under non-stress (NS) respectively and 292 to 1118 kg ha − 1 and 284 to 2086 kg ha − 1 under reproductive drought stress (RS), respectively. The NIL, IR96322–34-223-B-1-1-1-1 having qDTY 1.1 + qDTY 2.1 + qDTY 3.1 + Sub1 has been released as variety CR dhan 801 in India. IR 96321–1447-651-B-1-1-2 having qDTY 1.1 + qDTY 3.1 + Sub 1 and IR 94391–131–358-19-B-1-1-1 having qDTY 3.1 + Sub1 have been released as varieties Bahuguni dhan-1′ and ‘Bahuguni dhan-2’ respectively in Nepal. Background recovery of 94%, 93% and 98% was observed for IR 96322–34-223-B-1-1-1-1, IR 96321–1447-651-B-1-1-2 and IR 94391–131–358-19-B-1-1-1 respectively on 6 K SNP Infinium chip. Conclusion The drought and submergence tolerant rice varieties with pyramided multiple QTLs can ensure 0.2 to 1.7 t ha − 1 under reproductive stage drought stress and 0.1 to 1.0 t ha − 1 under submergence conditions with no yield penalty under non-stress to farmers irrespective of occurrence of drought and/or flood in the same or different seasons. Electronic supplementary material The online version of thi...

Development of introgression lines in high yielding, semi-dwarf genetic backgrounds to enable improvement of modern rice varieties for tolerance to multiple abiotic stresses free from undesirable linkage drag

“…The introgression lines possessed better grain quality than the traditional donors and so the development of multiple stress tolerant variety now with high quality has never been as easy as now. The development and release of marker-assisted breeding product for the rainfed lowland areas in IR64 and Swarna-Sub1 78 backgrounds are the successful examples that should instigate the rice breeders to deploy the identified QTLs in the marker-assisted breeding programs targeting grain yield improvement under multiple abiotic stresses.…”

Advances in Developing Multigene Abiotic and Biotic Stress-Tolerant Rice Varieties

“…Rice lines pyramided with multiple disease resistance genes (Xa4, Xa21, xa5, Bph18 and Pi40,) has conferred resistance against BLB, blast, and BPH disease [29]. Among abiotic stresses, recently, drought and flood tolerance were combined using marker assisted pyramiding of the drought QTLs (qDTY 1.1 + qDTY 2.1 + qDTY 3.1 ) and submergence gene (Sub1) together in a popular rice variety, Swarna [19]. The marker-assisted derived rice varieties have been released in different countries ( Table 2).…”

“…Improvement of germplasm involving improved donors free from undersirable linkage, identification and introgression of genomic regions after validation involving recent advances in genomics-assisted breeding has provided opportunity to combat the challenges arising due the occurance of multiple stresses [16]. An integrated genomics-assisted breeding approach to introgress desirable genes/QTLs conferring tolerance/resistance to major abiotic and biotic stresses in addition to improved yield and quality will help to combat the present situation [16][17][18][19][20]. The commercial use of QTLs/genes-conferred multiple stress tolerant/resistant rice varieties provides an effective, economical and environment friendly approach to protect the crop yield and productivity.…”

Genotypic response to water deficit applied at reproductive stage in rice: is the response unique across two contrasted climates?

“…The high complexity of combining adaptive with productive traits in the same genetic materials lowed the progress for improving genetic tolerance to drought (Kumar et al 2008). Breeding programs for tolerance opened two complementary ways: 1) the direct selection on grain yield under drought, assuming that yield is the target objective beyond the sequential mechanisms that generated it, focusing on the detection of QTL for yield and yield components (Lanceras et al 2004;Kumar et al 2008;Serraj et al 2011;Kumar et al 2014, Kumar et al 2018Sandhu et al 2019;); 2) the selection based on secondary traits, that are defined as stable traits correlated to high yielding genetic materials in favorable conditions and in predominant stress situations (Lafitte et al 2003), relying on indicators of tolerance (Subashri et al 2009;Sellamuthu et al 2011;He and Serraj 2012).…”