Prediction of hybrid grain yield performances in Indica Rice (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Oryza sativa</Emphasis> L.) with effect-increasing loci

One hundred and fifty-one rice hybrids produced in two sets of half-dialell crosses and their parents (13 cytoplasmic male sterile lines and 19 restorers) were used to predict the F₁ performances of seven yield traits through the parental genetic distances (GD) based on SSR markers. The positive loci (PL) and effect-increasing loci (IL), which were screened from SSR polymorphic loci by the F₁ traits of 32 parents, together with total loci (TL), were utilized to estimate parental GD and the models were found to predict the traits of hybrids derived from different parents, fixed parents, and different environments, respectively. The results were as follows: (1) 550 polymorphic loci were detected from 174 SSR markers: a dendrogram based on these loci could separate all the sterile and restorer lines used in the present study, which indicated that parental genetic diversity of F₁ was large; (2) the correlations between F₁ traits and parental GDs based on IL ranged from 0.61 to 0.87 with a mean of 0.76, and they were higher than those on TL or on PL; (3) predictions based on IL for F₁ traits (except grain weight per plant) derived from different environments were ideal, but worse for F₁ traits derived from different parents; and (4) IL was more effective than TL and PL in predicting traits of F₁ with fixed parents, and predictions for fixed restorer combinations were more effective than those for fixed sterile line combinations. These results should facilitate molecular prediction for hybrid yield and other traits by means of both elite sterile and restorer lines.