Abstract

Thailand has about 57 million rais of land grown to rice, 18 million of which have been planted to glutinous rice, comprising about 31% of the total area. There have only been about 3 rice varieties which farmers preferred to cultivate: Sanpatong 1, RD6 and Phrae 1 among the many good varieties of non-glutinous rice varieties, This project aimed to use two good glutinous rice varieties (Chainat 80 and Suphanburi 1) which are high yielding, dwarf, non-photoperiod sensitive and high resistance to disease and pests which are considered important characteristics of the rice plant as receiver plant in order to improve the rice varieties to become sweet glutinous by molecular marker-assisted backcrossing to select genotypes or genes that would lead to proper selection of recurrent parents and at the same time, reduce the time period of improvement. The experiment was started initially with the production of F1 seeds by crossing Suphanburi 1 and Chainat 80 which were used as donor parents with glutinous RD6 as recurrent parents. Results showed that 19 F1 seeds were produced by the cross between Chainat 80 and RD 6 while 82 seeds resulted from the cross between Suphanburi 1 and RD6. In the second planting season, 57 BC1F1 seeds resulted from the cross between non-glutinous Chainat 80 and glutinous RD6 while 147 seeds were produced from the cross between non-glutinous Suphanburi 1 and glutinous RD6. Aside from these, results also showed that 8 background markers were located in loci positions which could separate the genetic differences between non-glutinous Chainat 80 and glutinous RD6 and 7 background markers which were able to show the genetic difference between non-glutinous Suphanburi 1 and RD6.

Keywords:  glutinous rice, non-glutinous rice and molecular markers