In vitro Culture and Field Evaluation of Two Generations of Sorghum Mutants Induced by Gamma Ray Irradiation

Background and Objective: Sorghum is one of the important cereal crops worldwide, with a limited option of varieties to culture in Indonesia. This study aimed to evaluate the in vitro culture and field evaluation of two generations of Suri 3 Agritan sorghum mutants induced by gamma-ray irradiation to obtain a new high yielding variety with an improvement of nutritional value. Materials and Methods: This study has consisted of two experiments, i.e., in vitro culture of sorghum mutant irradiated by gamma rays and field evaluation of genetic diversity and nutritional content of gamma-ray irradiated sorghum in two generations. A hundred sprouts with the size of about 2 mm was transferred into each petri dish that filled with pure Murashige and Skoog® (MS0) growing media with Various gamma-ray irradiations are (0, 40, 50, 60 and 70 Gy). Results: The results showed that in vitro growing media and gamma-ray irradiation doses significantly affected the plantlet mutant growth performance, where the increase of irradiation dose impeded the mutant growth and the addition of BA was significantly reduced shoot growth but favoured for the root part. Field evaluation revealed significant variance on agronomic characters on different mutant generations and irradiation doses. A broad diversity was found in the 40 and 70 Gy irradiation dose in the 2nd generation. The 40 Gy mutants also displayed a clear qualitative variation of leaf colour, seed and panicle form. Conclusion: Nutrition profiling analysis concluded that the increase of irradiation dose was associated with the increase of fat, protein, ash, amylopectin and dietary fibre content; and the decrease of carbohydrate and amylose levels.