Growth performance of selected Malaysian rice germplasm under drought stress environment

The rice accessions reached the 50% flowering stage at the end of March, indicating that the crops underwent severe stress for about 2 weeks during panicle development and pre-flowering stages. All traits were drastically affected by the drought stress and significant reduction in their performance was also observed. Analysis of variance showed significant differences for all phenotypic and agronomic traits observed under stress environment. Heritability showed four phenotypic and agronomic traits, namely, days to 50% flowering, plant height, flag leaf length and flag leaf width. These traits showed high heritability both under non-stress (control) (67.7 – 82.6%) and stress (64.1 – 89.7%) environments. Grain yield had high heritability under non-stress environment (62.5%) but moderate heritability under stress environment (50.0%). Several significant positive as well as negative correlations under stress environment were observed among the traits. Similar trends of correlation were also observed under non-stress environments