Rice, like wheat, corn, rye, oats and barley belongs to Gramineae or grass family. The genus Oryza to which cultivated rice belongs, has twenty-one wild and two cultivated species (Table 1). Nine of the wild species are tetraploid and the remaining are diploid. Harlan and De Wet (1971) pro- posed classifying the wild relatives of a crop species into three categories on the basis of isolation barriers and the ease of gene transfer to the cultivated species. This is a useful concept for breeders. In Oryza, howev- er, F1 fertility and other dysfunctions of hybrids occur irrespective ofgenetic distance, and the distinction between the three categories is notalways clear. The pattern of variation among species examined through methods of numerical taxonomy, however, is helpful. A variation study of 16 species based on 42 morphological traits, reported by Morishima and Oka (1960) suggested that Oryza species can be divided into three main groups: (1) O. sativa and its relatives, (2) O. officinalis and its rela- tives, and (3) other more distantly related species.In recent years efforts have been made to introgress useful genes from wild species to cultivated rice through interspecific hybridization (Brar et al. 1996; Jena and Khush 1990; Multani et al. 1994). On the basis of ease of gene transfer, the primary gene pool comprises the wild species — O. rufipogon, O. nivara, O. glamapatula, O. meridionalis, O. breviligulata, O. longistaminata— and the cultivated species— O. sativa and O. glaberrima.
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