Genetic Diversity and Association amongst West Sumatra Brown Rice Genotype Based on Morphological and Molecular Markers

The genetic diversity of crops in West Sumatra Province is very high. One of the potentials of plant genetic resources that are well conserved is brown rice. However, the development of new rice varieties has threatened the existence of brown rice. Therefore, conservation efforts are needed to preserve West Sumatra brown-rice-landrace through several stages. The first step is exploration and collection of brown rice genotypes that are still cultivated in West Sumatra Province. The next step is to identify and characterize the brown rice to determine the character of each genotype. The purpose of this study was to explore and characterize brown rice landrace in West Sumatra.  The exploration resulted in 31 brown rice genotypes.  Variation in quantitative and qualitative traits was observed according to grain morphology.  Analysis of relatedness base on morphological grain markers resulted in three groups of brown rice with the degree of similarity of 0.70 and with slight differences in each group. Furthermore, DNA markers categorized the relatedness of brown rice landrace into six groups with 0.70 similarities.