Abstract:
Rice is a major food for humans in worldwide especially, in Sri Lanka. For more than three
millennia, Sri Lankan farmers have developed, preserved, and utilized traditional rice
types. The main objective of this research was to evaluate the two bacterial strains on
vegetative growth and yield response in the Sri Lankan traditional rice variety of
"Kuruluthuda". The pots experiment was conducted under Completely Randomized
Design (CRD) with Three treatments. Kuruluthuda is traditional red rice variety in Sri
Lanka (Accession Nu of Kuruluthuda:3549). Bacteria strains were used as bacterial-based
bioferlilizers. They were known as "Plant Growth Promoting Bacteria". In this study, used
two bacterial treatments and another one is control. Bacteria strains were members of the
Bacillus genus. In this study, Treatment One was known as Bacterial strain I-I (Accession
Nu: PV174539). The treatment two was known as Bacterial strain I-II (Accession
Number:174565) in NCBI. These Bacteria were already isolated from Rhizosphere soil and
165 rRNA gene was partially sequenced using sangar dideoxy sequencing method by
Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna. Biofertilizers were added once every two
weeks for rice plants. Vegetative growth parameters were analyzedby ANOVA version of
Minitab 17 at0.05 significant level. Bacteria strain I-I (T1) had significantly different from
other two treatments in plant height. T1 had highest mean plant height (118.00 +3.62cm).
T2 recorded minimum mean plant height (94.50+9.12cm). T3 indicate the moderate mean
plant height (110.00+3.03cm). About tiller number had no significant diflerence by
treatments. Statistically significant difference among treatments results in number of
leaves. Bacterial strain I-I (T1) resulted in the longest leaves while bacterial strain I-II (T2)
produced the shortest but higher width, and the control plants (T3) showed moderate
values. Also, Colour of leaves were observed by visually using Leaf Colour Chart.
Bacterial strain I-II (T2) had very greenest colour other than treatments. The study
demonstrates that Bacillus inoculation can improve vegetative growth and yield in
traditional rice varieties of Kuruluthuda, offering a sustainable alternative to chemical
fertilizers.
