Genetic diversity and its relationship to hybrid performance and heterosis in rice as revealed by PCR-based markers

Ten elite inbred lines (four japonica, six indica), chosen from those widely used in the hybrid rice breeding program at Human Hybrid Rice Research Center in China, were crossed to produce all possible hybrids excluding reciprocals. The 45 F₁ hybrids along with the ten parents were evaluated for eight traits of agronomic importance, including yield potential, in a replicated field trial. The ten parents were analyzed with 100 arbitrary decamer oligonucleotide primers and 22 microsatellite (simple sequence repeats, SSRs) primer sets via polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Out of the 100 random primers used, 74 were informative and amplified 202 non-redundant bands (variants) with a mean of 2.73 bands per polymorphic primer. All 22 microsatellite primer sets representing 23 loci in the rice genome showed polymorphisms among the ten parents and revealed 90 alleles with an average of 3.91 per SSR locus. Cluster analysis based on Nei's genetic distance calculated from the 291 (202 RAPDs, 89 SSRs) non-redundant variants separated the ten parental lines into two major groups that corresponds to indica and japonica subspecies, which is consistent with the pedigree information. Strong heterosis was observed in hybrids for most of the traits examined. For the 43 diallel crosses (excluding 2 crosses not heading), yield potential, its components (including panicles per plant, spikelets per panicle and 1000-grain weight) and their heterosis in F₁ hybrids showed a significant positive correlation with genetic distance. When separate analyses were performed for the three subsets, yield potential and its heterosis showed significant positive correlations with genetic distance for the 15 indica x indica crosses and the 6 japonica x japonica crosses; however, yield potential and its heterosis were not correlated with genetic distance for the 22 indica x japonica crosses. Results indicated that genetic distance measures based on RAPDs and SSRs may be useful for predicting yield potential and heterosis of intra-subspecific hybrids, but not inter-subspecies hybrids.