Evaluation of genotypic variation for growth of rice seedlings under optimized hydroponics medium

Published on Sep 11, 2018 10:51 AM

Although rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a semi-aquatic plant, its
growth in solution culture is often problematic. In
commonly used rice hydroponics media, plants exhibited
mild nitrogen deficiency, leaf tip burn, salt deposition, along
with zinc and iron deficiency. Therefore, we aimed to
optimize the nutrient media for growing rice plants taking
into consideration the nutrient concentration, pH and ratio
of NH4+ to NO3– nitrogen (N) and named it as ‘Pusa Rice
Hydroponics’ (PusaRicH). PusaRicH contains higher
amounts of macronutrients, significantly lower B, Mn and
Cl and higher amounts of Zn than two commonly used
hydroponics media, ‘Yoshida’ and ‘Kumura B’. The optimal
ratio of NH4+ to NO3– – N in PusaRicH medium was 0.5 mM
NH4+ and 7.0 mM NO3– with pH 5.0. The PusaRicH medium
was validated by growing 100 diverse rice genotypes and it
significantly outperformed the widely cited ‘Yoshida’ and
‘Kimura B’. Cluster analysis carried out on the squared
Euclidean distance matrix of biomass and leaf area values
of genotypes revealed four major clusters in all hydroponics
medium. However, only PusaRicH medium resulted in ten
genotypes as good performers in comparison to other two
widely cited media. Therefore, the optimized PusaRicH
medium can be used successfully to grow rice seedlings in
hydroponic system which will aid in screening large number
of genotypes in breeding and other physiological
experiments.
 

Keywords: Ammonium/nitrate ratio, elemental composition, hydroponics culture, media pH, Oryza sativa

Info

Year: 2018
Volume: 78
Issue: 3
Article DOI: 10.31742/IJGPB.78.3.3
Print ISSN: 0019-5200
Online ISSN: 0975-6906

Authors

Sandeep Sharma, Priyanka Borah, Mukesh Kumar Meena, Prem Bindraban and Renu Pandey info_circle

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