Sasmita Behera

ICAR-National Rice Reseach Institute · Crop Improvement Division

Global efforts to address malnutrition and hidden hunger, particularly prevalent in low-and middle-income countries, have intensified, with a focus on enhancing the nutritional content of staple crops like rice. Despite serving as a staple for over half of the world's population, rice falls short in meeting daily nutritional requirements, especiall...

Drought is becoming a major threat to rice farming across the globe owing to the depletion of water tables in rice-growing belts. Drought affects rice plants at multiple stages, causing damage at morphological and physio-biochemical levels, leading to severe losses that exceed losses from all other stresses. The amalgamation of conventional breedin...

Crop improvement relies on understanding the morphological variation and population structure of germplasm collections. Because of the importance of rice (Oryza sativa L.) as a major world crop, the origin and diversity of this plant have piqued the curiosity of many people. In this study, A total of 107 aromatic rice lines were classified using fi...

Background: The nutritional value of rice can be improved by developing varieties with optimum levels of grain phytic acid (PA). Artificial low-PA mutants with impaired PA biosynthesis have been developed in rice through induced mutagenesis. However, low-PA mutant stocks with drastically reduced grain PA content have poor breeding potential, and th...

BACKGROUND To improve production efficiency, positive alleles corresponding to yield‐related attributes must be accumulated in a single elite background. We designed and used cgSSR markers, which are superior to random SSR markers in genome‐wide association study, to identify genomic regions that contribute to panicle characters and grain yield in...

Grain size plays a significant role in rice, starting from affecting yield to consumer preference, which is the driving force for deep investigation and improvement of grain size characters. Quantitative inheritance makes these traits complex to breed on account of several alleles contributing to the complete trait expression. We employed genome-wi...

Quantitative trait loci (QTL) for rice grain weight identified using bi-parental populations in various environments were found inconsistent and have a modest role in marker assisted breeding and map-based cloning programs. Thus, the identification of a consistent consensus QTL region across populations is critical to deploy in marker aided breedin...

Assessing genetic diversity and development of a core set of elite breeding lines is a prerequisite for selective hybridization programes intended to improve the yield potential in rice. In the present study, the genetic diversity of newly developed elite lines derived from indicax tropical japonica and indicax indica crosses were estimated by 38 r...

Genomic selection (GS) was first developed in animal systems as a modified version of marker-assisted selection. GS gained its popularity in plant breeding very quickly due to its effectiveness in selections. It makes use of genome-wide marker effects to assign genotypic values to individuals in the population from which they are selected for impro...

Plant architecture has a substantial impact on photosynthesis, which leads to increased yield production. Many plant architecture characters are quantitative in inheritance, making bi-parental QTL mapping difficult to discover all the genomic regions underpinning these traits. GWAS approach is the most promising approach to dissect these traits. We...

Phosphorus (P) flow in agricultural land depends on the P taken off from harvested product, its losses through runoff and fertilizer applied to balance the removed P. Phytic acid (PA), the major storage form of phosphorus (P) in cereal grains is a key anti-nutrient for human and non-ruminants leads to eutrophication of waterways. As the natural non...

The rainfed lowland ecology constitutes around 37% of the total rice growing area in India. Enhancing and stabilizing rice productivity under rainfed lowland ecology is imperative to improve the overall rice productivity of the country. But the genetic enhancement of rice under this ecology poses unique challenges which include occurrence of freque...