Kumari, SaritaBHARTI, PHULENDRA KUMAR2024-09-232024-09-232023M/AB/396/2021-22https://krishikosh.egranth.ac.in/handle/1/5810214833Rice is a cereal grain serve as source of calories for global population. World demand for both the quantity and quality of rice. Agronomically important traits and grain mineral content have significant role in improvements of quantity and quality of rice. Among minerals Iron, Zinc, Copper and Manganese play important role in various metabolisms of living organisms and hence are an important mineral for human. Iron (Fe) and Zinc (Zn) is major cause of hidden hunger and malnutrition for the developing countries which are largely dependent on rice as staple food. Similarly, other minerals such as; Manganese (Mn) and Copper (Cu) is becoming crucial for the human health and development. Biofortification is the cheap and sustainable approach for mass eradication of hunger and malnourished population. However, biofortification is often compromised with the availabilities of high mineral accumulator rice accession as donor, lack of trait linked marker information etc. Considering these, present studies was conducted with objectives to study the molecular profiling for important agronomical traitsand natural variation in grain mineral contentamong indigenous wild rice accessions from Indo-Gangetic plain that is hotspot for rice variabilities.Large phenotypic variation was found among the wild rice accessions for different agronomically important traits and rice grain mineralcontent. The significance of marker trait association was studied through adjusted p- value using Bonferroni correction. Adjusted p-value,<0.00113 was used for interpreting significance level of the markers associated with agronomical traits and grain mineral content. Forty-three significant marker trait associations were assessed for given studies. Thirty-four SNP markers were found to be linked with agronomical traits in the study and nine markers were found to be associated with grain mineral content. The identified loci were annotated based on their genic localization and gene for cellular function, molecular function and transporters were observed. Most of the annotated genes at the SNP positions were uncharacterized putative expressed. Thus, their role for the concerned trait may be inferred after validations. Genes found associated with the region may be use for improvement of crop using transgenic program after studying their expression under concerned associated traits. The wild rice accession: NKSWR144 was identified as high accumulator for iron, zinc, manganese and copper and can be used for the improvement of grain mineral content using mapped marker based back cross mechanism.EnglishThesis