“…Poor fertility is the main barrier for utilizing heterosis between the two rice (O. sativa L.) subspecies, indica and japonica and the development of autotetraploid hybrids (2n = 4x = 48) has been advised as a new method for increasing heterosis in hybrid rice Ghaleb et al, 2020;Rao et al, 2022). An autotetraploid indica/japonica hybrid combines the advantages of polyploidy and heterosis between indica and japonica (Hu et al, 2010;Yu et al, 2021a;Huang and Huang, 2022;Rao et al, 2022) and realized to have great potential to increase the yield of rice Ghouri et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2021;Ku et al, 2022). Furthermore, autotetraploid indica/japonica hybrids hold more nutrition value than diploid rice (Zhiyong et al, 1987 andChen et al, 2021Ghouri et al, 2023) and therefore said to have stronger potential vigor in rice breeding than diploid rice does (Shahid et al, 2011;Rout et al, 2020;.…”