Phenotypic Analysis of Anther and Pollen in Diversified Genotype of Barnyard Millet (Echinochloa Frumentaceae) Floral Characters

The paper investigates the scope of variability in germplasm collection of barnyard millet (Echinochloa frumentacea) for its crop improvement and evolution of new high yielding varieties. This is the quickest growing millet and it produces a crop in a period of six weeks. It is grown in India, Japan and China as a substitute for rice when the rice crop fails. The present investigation is to compare the wild type barnyard millet with the normal type with respect to morphological characters that delineate the three types in two groups is related to the differences in its days of flowering, plant height (cm), total number of tillers, total productive tillers, ear length (cm), days to maturity, anther length, pollen diameter and fertility percentage were studied. Normal cultivated types are: small flower size, early hours of flowering, short viability of pollen, non-availability of pollen grain and slight opening of flowers that too in short period, while these new types of germplasm IEC 566 and IEC 566/2 produced abundant pollen grains open for a long time, protrude enough to do emasculation and collection of pollen grains facilitating emasculation and crossing. The results indicate that the potential of barnyard millet in enhancing the hybridization work which in turn will help in genetic analysis, heterotic study and generating more segregants for further barnyard crop improvement.