Determination of Candidate Breeding Resource from Sri Lankan Traditional Rice Mudukiri Al

Most of the traditional rice varieties conserved at Plant Genetic Resources Centre, Sri Lanka,possess more than one accession. Determination of morphological variation and yieldpotential among accession within same variety would be useful for breeding new varietiesand farmer introductions. Six accessions of Mudukiri Al variety were selected for this study.The objective of this study was to determine the morphological variation among accessionsof Mudukiri Al for selecting candidates for future breeding. Six accessions obtained from thePlant Genetics Resources Centre, Sri Lanka, were grown in Kamburupitiya with threereplicates in a completely randomised design from November 2013. Days to fifth leaf (DFL),seedling height at fifth leaf (SHT), leaf area of fifth leaf (LA), days to flowering (DF), plantheight at flowering (PH), culm number at flowering (CN), total number of panicles (PN),number of grains per first panicle (GN), grain length (GL) and width (GW) were recordedwhich varied from 51 to 59 days, 63.8 to 80.3 cm, 6.5 to 44.4 cm2, 86 to 102 days, 112.7 to148.6 cm, 16 to 38, 7 to 29, 103 to 255, 0.7 to 0.9 cm and 0.3 to 0.4 cm respectively.Accession 4,144 produced significantly higher GN of 255 while accession 3,970, 4,145 and3,758 produced 184, 160 and 166 respectively. Accessions 3,970 and 5,536 were with shortawns. A positive correlation between DFL and PH (0.870) had been observed. Higher GNand the highest CN (38) would be favourable for selecting accession 4,144 as a candidatebreeding resource.Keywords: Mudukiri Al, Morphological variation, Breeding resource