Principal Component Analysis of Grain Yield and its Attributing Traits in Recombinant Inbred Lines of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Developed for Submergence Tolerance

Submergence is an important abiotic stress affecting yield and productivity of rice. There are many landraces such as AC 42088, AC 42087 and AC 38575 which show tolerance to long duration flooding. These landraces can be used as donors in breeding programs for development of improved varieties which show increased yield as well as tolerance to submergence. To study the variability in yield and its attributing traits in the population, principal component analysis was carried out. The present investigation was studied in recombinant inbred lines (RIL) population consisting of 120 lines where principal component analysis was carried out on different agromorphological traits viz. days to fifty percent flowering, plant height, panicle length, total tillers per plant, number of effective tillers per plant, number of filled grains and Spikelet fertility, test weight, grain yield per plant, biomass per plant and harvest index to assess the relative contribution of various traits towards total variability. It was found that first five components with Eigen values greater than 1 accounted for 74.33% of total explained variability. The highest positive eigenvalue was observed for plant height and panicle length in PC1, revealing their maximum contribution to variation in the lines.