Abstract:
The next biggest challenge for mankind is food security. To feed the growing world
population yield of cereal crops need to increase 50% by 2050. This can be made
possible only by developing a holistic understanding of plant biology and adopting
cutting edge genomic science to fuel this increase. Also, this yield increment is
required to maintain the sustainability of the rice industry. In this study, it was
hypothesized that source imbalance leads to lower yield potential in Sri Lankan
rice. An experiment was carried out to evaluate the optimum source sink balance
using a sink limited cultivar (Bg250). Tiller optimization was carried out by
maintaining tiller number during plant development. Findings from this study
clearly demonstrated that source and sink imbalance exists in the cultivar tested.
The highest yield potential was achieved when plants were reduced to 8 tillers.
Further, the reduced tiller number promoted an increase in the other yield
components select as spikelets per panicle, average grain length and width, 1000
grain weight and the harvest index. Overall findings suggested that there is an
opportunity for a major increment in Sri Lankan rice cultivars by developing new
ideotypes that have altered source sink balance.
