Study on Floral and Pollen Characters of Tetraploid Rice

Polyploidization is the evolution trend of many crops, and the yield increased obviously after polyploidization. The polyploidization of rice often brings “gigas” of both vegetative organs and seeds. Howevere, in rice breeding, it is required for restoring lines to have not only big anthers but also abundant pollens. People often doubt that the enlargement of the floral organ may just be enlargement of cell size in polyploid rice. So, it is of significance to study characteristics of floral organs and pollens of several tetraploid rice varieties or lines. Floral organ and pollen characteristics of Sg99012 and HN2026 were studied comparatively by stages and different ploidy levels, with the materials 9311, HD9802S, and PA64S as the control. The results showed that chromosome doubling had much more influence on floral characteristics of every lines than seeding by stages, and the tetraploids of every lines displayed “gigas”. In correlation analysis, spikelet length, spikelet width, and anther length had significant correlation; spikelet width and anther width had significant correlation, too. Both seeding by stages and chromosome doubling made the correlations of characters between every floral organ changed to some extent. Seeding by stages had little effect on pollen diameter and fertility of HN2026-4X and Sg99012-4X. But chromosome doubling increased pollen size of every lines remarkably, and also increased the pollen quantity of PMeS (polyploid meiosis stability) restoring line HN2026-4X and gene map restoring line 9311-4X remarkably, whereas only had little effect on that of sterile lines. Moreover, chromosome doubling changed pollen fertility and made the number of fertility pollen of 9311 reduced significantly, but the pollen fertility of HN2026 (PMeS restoring line) and PA64S (sterile line) almost had no change after chromosome doubling. The results showed that tetraploid restoring lines had advantage of abundant and big size pollens, and tetraploid sterile lines had the characters of big size pollens, few change of pollen quantity and stable sterile character. These results provided evidence in reproductive biology for utilizing heterosis of polyploid rice by two-line method.