Cuban Rice Mutants Obtained from Protons Radiations

Rice mutation breeding can be considered especially success- ful in obtaining new cultivars and broadening the genetic base of this crop. In order to obtain new Cuban varieties of rice with either improved agronomic characteristics or biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, proton radiation was used to generate novel mutants of the Amistad-82 rice variety. Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) techniques were used to evaluate the genomic diversity among the mutants and the Amistad-82 variety. Several rice mutants were obtained and the use of AFLP markers confirmed the adequacy of proton radiation for inducing genetic variability in rice