International Journal on Advanced Science Engineering Information Technology Amylose Content and Grain Length of New Rice Transgressive Variants Derived from a Cross Between O. rufipogon and Malaysian Rice Cultivar MR219 Parviz Fasahat 1 , Kharidah Muhammad 2 , Aminah Abdullah 3 & Wickneswari Ratnam 1 1 School of Environmental and Natural Resource Sciences, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: pf65524@yahoo.com; wicki@ukm.my 2 Department of Food Science, University Putra Malaysia, 43400 Serdang, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: kharidah@putra.upm.edu.my; 3 School of Chemical Science and Food Technology, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: kama@ukm.my Abstract— Amylose content is one of the important grain quality properties of rice. A total of 10 new rice genotypes (BC 2 F 7 generation) derived from a cross between O. rufipogon Griff. accession IRGC105491 and O. sativa subspecies indica cv. MR219 with high yield were evaluated for amylose content in three environments in Peninsular Malaysia. One of the parents, a popular high yielding Malaysian rice cultivar MR219 was used as a check. Based on the average amylose content across the environments, the genotype G13 showed significantly (p < 0.05) different amylose content (23.88 %) in comparison to other genotypes. Two genotypes G13 (25.7%) and G15 (25.6%) were higher than MR219 (25.1%) in terms of amylose content in Sungai Besar environment. There was a positive (r 2 =0.018) but no significant correlation between amylose content and grain length. Keywords— Oryza rufipogon; Oryza sativa;Transgressive variants; Amylose content. I. INTRODUCTION Rice is one of the most important staple leading food crop of more than one-half of the world population with approximately 95% of production in Asia [3]. In general it is marketed as milled grains as opposed to wheat and corn which are processed to yield flour. In Malaysia, rice is the most important food crop and is cultivated in about 660 thousand ha of arable land in the country [9]. Rice production in Malaysia has witnessed an impressive rise in the recent past. Rice quality is a main concern for all people involved in producing, processing and consuming rice, since it influences the nutritional and commercial value of grains. The most important quality components encompass appearance, milling quality, cooking and nutritional quality. Amylose content (AC) is being considered to be one of the most important traits related to the cooking quality of rice [10]. The starch is the major component of rice endosperm and consists of amylose and amylopectin. The amylose is a relatively less- branched α (1,4) – linked glucose polymer [21]. The enzyme granule bound starch synthase l (GBSSl) is required for amylose synthesis, and several alleles are encoded by the Wx locus [55], [56]. AC in endosperm is closely correlated with cooking and eating quality of rice and is mainly governed by genetic effects and environmental conditions [29]. AC milled rice is considered as one of the most important quality parameters for predicting rice eating and processing behaviour [17],[25],[34]-[35]. Rice grain length and shape are important to consumers because they determine the physical appearance and affect the cooking quality of the grain. Seed size or weight is important in the evolution of cereal crops because humans tend to select for large seed size during the early domestication process, as evidenced by the fact that most cultivated species have larger seeds than their wild relatives [40]-[41]. Over the last decade, wild species in rice have been successfully utilized for introgression of diverse traits such as cytoplasmic male sterility (cms) [25], [11], abiotic and biotic stress [14],[1], yield and its components [37], [32], and grain quality [28], [2], into modern cultivars. Conventional and molecular breeding have demonstrated that the introgression of O. rufipogon gene could add new traits or improve the existing agronomic traits of O. sativa such as grain quality [28], [2]. Three wild rice species, Oryza rufipogon, O. longistaminata and O. glaberrima, have been widely used in rice breeding 20