Abstract

Soil salinity represents an increasing threat to rice production. The success of salt tolerance breeding programs employing traditional screening and selection has been limited in the past decades. 40 rice genotypes were screened in saline soil of electrical conductivity (EC) of 4, 8 and 12 ds/m in vegetative growth stage in 2009. Tolerant genotypes were tested in young seedling stage in hydroponic system and then reproductive stage in 2010. Results show that vegetative growth was less affected by salt stress comparison to reproductive stage. Na and Na-K ratio in tolerant genotypes were lower than suspectible genotypes in salt condition in young seedling stage. Shastak-mohammadi, Hasani, Trom-Danesh, Line109 and Line75 were more tolerant to salt stress for the evaluated traits in reproductive stage. Molecular analysis showed that UBC-251 and UBC-244 displayed variation in the banding pattern of individual rice genotypes. Results of molecular analysis confirmed evaluation of phenotypic analysis.

Key words: Oryza sativa, salt stress, different growth stage, random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers.