Sel’skokhozyaistvennaya Biologiya [Agricultural Biology], 2011, № 5, p. 91-95 UDC 633.18:631.527:581.143.6 ESTIMATION AND SELECTION OF LINES WITH IMPROVED ECONOMIC IMPORTANT DETERMINANTS IN POPULATIONS OF RICE SOMACLONES 1 Primorsky Research and Development Institute of Agriculture, RAAS, Primorsky territory, Ussuriisk region, Timiryazevsky settlement 692539, Russia e-mail: fe.smc_rf@mail.ru V.A. Kovalevskaya1, V.N. Zmeeva2, S.S. Lysakovskaya1, Yu. <...> N. Zhuravlev2, L.D. Seletskaya2, A.V. Shubina2, T.I. Muzarok2 2 Institute of Biology and Soil Science, FEB RAS, Vladivostok 690022, Russia e-mail: zmeeva@ibss.dvo.ru Received August 27, 2009 S u m m a r y In tissue culture of rice varieties of Far Eastern selection the authors isolated the somaclonal variants, estimated the variability of determinants in regenerants and selected economic important variants in population of somaclones. <...> The high productive and dwarf lines were isolated, which can be used as initial material in subsequent selection process. <...> Keywords: plant breeding, rice, in vitro tissue culture, line, cultivar, somaclonal variants, somaclonal variation, productivity, shot stem. <...> However, growing season of rice is limited by duration of warm season and insolation deficit; these conditions satisfy the biological requirements of only early-ripening varieties whose growing season is less than 112 days (2, 3). <...> Along with it, monsoon climate contributes in some years to the spread of rise blast fungus – the most harmful disease of this crop (4). <...> The major direction of breeding rice in the Far East of RF is creation of early-ripening cultivars adapted to local growing conditions and combining cold resistance, stably high grain production, improved technological properties of grain, lodging resistance and immunity to blast disease. <...> In recent years, biotechnological approaches such as creation of somaclonal variants are widely used to obtain initial material (6-10). <...> Phenotypic diversity of plants regenerated from somatic cells in vitro was called a somaclonal variation (11). <...> Somaclonal variants, as a rule, differ from the original cultivar in a number of valuable properties including such agriculturally important traits as term of booting, plant height, number of productive shoots, number of spikelets in the main <...>