Significant differences were observed between strains for basidiome number and weight, while no significant differentiation for quantitative morphological traits was observed between geographical origins and taxonomic groups.
Identification based on morphological traits was based on Vaughan (Vaughan 1989; Vaughan 2003) and discussed in Villafañe et al. (2007).
Selection based on foreground, background and morphological traits was practiced from BC1F1 onwards for identification of lines that were similar to the recurrent parent.
Field evaluation of yield and morphological traits was carried out in the experimental fields of Rice Breeding and Genetics Centre, Aduthurai (Tamil Nadu) and Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi.
Comparison of the evolutionary rates between the molecular and morphological traits was conducted using PAUP*4.0b10 [60] to optimize the distance matrix and to describe the length-estimated tree on the basis of two recent studies [26], [27].
Sex difference in morphological traits was detected in preliminary analyses, but because the sex difference is not the main focus of this study, we performed all the analyses separately for the sexes.
The decreasing trend of all studied morphological traits was linear (Table 2).
Covariation among morphological traits was assessed using principal components analysis (PCA), as implemented in PAST [ 92].
A role for SPL15 in leaf morphological traits was also revealed by Usami et al [ 49].
The reduction in sensitive accessions in terms of all studied morphological traits was higher than in tolerant accessions.
The phenotypic differentiation coefficient (VST) of all morphological traits was 36.06 %, indicating that differentiation mainly occurred within populations (Table 1).
