Rice is the primary food for more than half of the world’s population, especially in developing countries of Asia, where water scarcity/drought is becoming an imminent threat for sustaining rice productivity. Rice uses two to five times more water than other cereals especially wheat or maize and consumes about 30 per cent of the freshwater used for agricultural crops worldwide. Drought is the most serious environmental stress which is estimated to affect 50 percent of the world’s rice production to a greater or lesser extent. Introgression of drought tolerance to the cultivated varieties is a way to overcome the scarcity of water. But the time and breeding cycle needs to be reduced to use this effectively. To overcome the time scarcity, minimize the limitation of conventional breeding and recover the parental genome within 2–3 generations, the usage of marker assisted backcrossing technique is most effective way. Here in this study Marker assisted backcross breeding (MABB) technique is used to identify the lines with highest recurrent parent genome (RPG) recovery. IR64 is an adopted variety with drought susceptibility which was crossed with Apo an upland rice. Sixty seven BC2F3 populations were screened for foreground selection for three drought QTLs namely qDTY2.2, qDTY3.1 and qDTY8.1. Four lines which were homozygous for the different QTL combination were identified. A total of 596 SSR markers were tested to identify the polymorphism between the parents and 98 of them found to be polymorphic. Background analysis revealed in the BC2F2 generation the average RPG recovery was above 80 % and that for the selected plant was 85%. This study revealed the usefulness of marker assisted backcrossing for the quick recovery of a parental genome in a backcrossing population.

Keywords: Marker assisted backcrossing; Recurrent parent genome; Rice; Drought.