Abstract

MONTOYA, María et al. Morphological charactherization of 13 rice venezuelan varieties. Agronomía Trop. [online]. 2007, vol.57, n.4, pp.299-311. ISSN 0002-192X.

In Venezuela, rice, Oryza sativa L., is the third cereal of human consumption, to which continuous studies are performed in search of genetic improvement. Nowadays there are few references involving morphological characterization of the main varieties used in Venezuelan rice production under the same experimental conditions. In this respect, we described 13 rice varieties available in our country and 35 elite lines jointly planted under alfa latticce (6*8) design with two blocks at INIA-Portuguesa experimental field, in order to evaluate 41 characters using the descriptors suggested by the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) during all crop developmental stages, including culinary and milling quality, and disease incidence. Under this study we found no significant differences among varieties yield, only 38.46% of the studied varieties presented less than 17% chalky plus white belly grains. Concerning the yield of whole grain 61.54% of the materials had less than 47% and more than 96% showed intermediate values for amylose content. Sarocladium oryzae and Helminthosporium spp affected higher number of materials with an incidence between 5 and 25%. Broadly speaking, through the morphological assessment we determined that qualitative nominal variables are the same for all the materials, whereas qualitative ordinal and quantitative variables differ, thus allowing to achieving a differential description among genetic materials.

Keywords : Oryza sativa L; morphology; characterization; varieties; descriptors; culinary quality.