NEW DELHI (Commodity Online): A group of thirty-one scientists from India have achieved a break through in decoding the genome of pigeonpea, the second most important pulse crop of India. The pulses variety also known as 'arhar' and 'tur'is an important grain legume crop of India. About 85% of the world pigeonpea is produced and consumed in India where it is a key crop for food and nutritional security of the people. India imports pigeonpea from Myanmar which is the second largest producer.
This is the first plant genome sequenced entirely through a network of Indian institutions and it will provide highly valuable resource for variety improvement of pigeonpea. Average pulse crop productivity in India has remained low at about 650 kg per hectare for the last six decades leading to soaring ‘Dal’ prices with increasing demands.
Lack of high yielding, disease and pest resistant varieties is a major factor for the stagnant pulse productivity. Slow progress in breeding high yielding Arhar varieties is attributed to dearth of genetic information coupled with large crop duration and intractable pod borer problem and poor utilization of wild germplasm resources. Development of DNA markers tightly linked to important agronomic traits is a prerequisite for undertaking molecular breeding in crops. Availability of the Arhar genome sequence will accelerate development of new varieties and hybrids with enhanced productivity by making use of germplasm resources, in a way similar to the rice genome experience.
A group of thirty-one Indian scientists from Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) Institutes, State Agricultural Universities and Banaras Hindu University, led by Prof. Nagendra Kumar Singh from ICAR’s National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology at New Delhi were involved in the project.
The genome of popular Arhar variety ‘Asha’ was assembled using long sequence reads of 454-FLX second generation sequencing technology resulting in 511 million base pairs of high quality genome sequence information. The scientists have identified 47,004 protein coding genes in the Arhar genome, of which 1,213 genes are for disease resistance and 152 genes for tolerance to drought, heat and salinity that make it a hardy crop. In contrast to soybean, Arhar has fewer number of genes for oil biosynthesis and larger number of genes for cellulose biosynthesis which make it an oil-free woody plant. The genome sequence was used to develop a large number of ‘Arhar’ DNA markers which were experimentally validated for high rate of variation among the pigeonpea varieties. These markers will be useful for DNA fingerprinting and diversity analysis of pigeonpea germplasm and molecular breeding applications.
Until a couple of years ago pigeonpea was considered an orphan legume crop because developed countries would not invest in the research due to the crop being cultivated mainly in the tropical and subtropical countries but now substantial amount of genomic resources have been generated, largely due to the efforts of Indo-US Agricultural Knowledge Initiative (AKI) and Network Project on Transgenics in Crops (NPTC) both with funding support from the ICAR.
National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology (ICAR), New Delhi,Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), New Delhi,Indian Institute of Pulse Research (ICAR), Kanpur, UP,Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, UP,Panjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth, Akola, Maharashtra and University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad, Karnataka were involved in the project.
