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The incorporation of plant residues into soil can be considered a keystone sustainability factor in improving soil structure function. However, the effects of plant residue addition on the soil microbial communities involved in biochemical cycles and abiotic stress phenomena are poorly understood. In this study, experiments were conducted to evaluate the role of raw garlic stalk (RGS) amendment in avoiding monoculture-related production constraints by studying the changes in soil chemical properties and microbial community structures. RGS was applied in four different doses, namely the control (RGS0), 1% (RGS1), 3% (RGS2), and 5% (RGS3) per 100 g of soil. The RGS amendment significantly increased soil electrical conductivity (EC), N, P, K, and enzyme activity. The soil pH significantly decreased with RGS application. High-throughput Illumina MiSeq sequencing revealed significant alterations in bacterial community structures in response to RGS application. Among the 23 major taxa detected, Anaerolineaceae, Acidobacteria, and Cyanobacteria exhibited an increased abundance level. RGS2 increased some bacteria reported to be beneficial including Acidobacteria, Bacillus, and Planctomyces (by 42%, 64%, and 1% respectively). Furthermore, internal transcribed spacer (ITS) fungal regions revealed significant diversity among the different treatments, with taxa such as Chaetomium (56.2%), Acremonium (4.3%), Fusarium (4%), Aspergillus (3.4%), Sordariomycetes (3%), and Plectosphaerellaceae (2%) showing much abundance. Interestingly, Coprinellus (14%) was observed only in RGS-amended soil. RGS treatments effectively altered soil fungal community structures and reduced certain known pathogenic fungal genera, i.e., Fusarium and Acremonium. The results of the present study suggest that RGS amendment potentially affects the microbial community structures that probably affect the physiological and morphological attributes of eggplant under a plastic greenhouse vegetable cultivation system (PGVC) in monoculture.

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ABSTRACT. Wheat flour quality is an important consideration in the breeding and development of new cultivars. A strong association between high-molecular weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) and bread making quality has resulted in the widespread utilization of HMW-GS in wheat breeding. In this study, we analyzed 242 lines of wheat, including landraces from the provinces of Punjab and Baluchistan, as well as the commercial varieties of Pakistan, to determine allelic variation in the Glu-A1, Glu-B1, and Glu-D1 loci encoding HMW-GS. Higher genetic diversity was observed for HMW-GS in landraces from Baluchistan, followed by landraces collected from Punjab and then commercial varieties. Rare and uncommon subunits were observed in Glu-B1, whereas Glu-A1 was less polymorphic. However, Glu-B1 was the highest contributor to overall diversity (78%), with a total of 31 rare alleles, followed by Glu-D1 (20%) with the high quality 5+10 allele and other variants. Commercial cultivars possessed favorable alleles, potentially from indirect selection for wheat flour quality by the breeders; however, this indirect selection 4830 F. Yasmeen et al. ©FUNPEC-RP www.funpecrp.com.br Genetics and Molecular Research 14 (2): 4829-4839 (2015) has decreased the pedigree base of commercial cultivars. The allelic combinations, including 2*, 5+10, and 17+18, showing high quality scores were frequent among landraces, indicating their usefulness in future crop improvement and breeding programs.

Indian mustard (Brassica juncea L.) germplasm consisting 167 accessions including one check cultivar was evaluated for qualitative and quantitative traits. The present study was conducted to investigate genetic diversity and correlation among studied genotypes of B. juncea L. based on agro-morphological at NARC, Islamabad, Pakistan. To investigate the genetic diversity based on morphological characters, data was recorded on 20 quantitative and 12 qualitative traits. The calculated data was analyzed through two complementary methods, i.e. PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and cluster analysis. Among all the studied cultivars, significant diversity was recorded for different agro-morphological characters. Among all the parameters, maximum variance was recorded for pod shattering (427.2) followed by plant height (345.6), days to 100% flowering (336.2) and main raceme length (210.0). Among all the characters, the greatest and highly significant association (0.99) was found between days to maturity 50% and days to maturity 100% followed by correlation (0.86) among days to flowering 50% and days to flowering 100%, correlation value (0.71) was calculated among leaf length and leaf width. Using cluster analysis all the genotypes were divided into five major groups. It was observed that 7 out of 20 principal components with an Eigen value of ≥1.0 calculated for 73.92% of the total diversity observed between 167 accessions of Indian mustard (B. juncea L.). The contribution of first three PCs in the total PCs was 23.25, 12.87 and 11.24, respectively. Among all the investigated accessions two genotypes 26,813 and 26,817 showed great How to cite this paper: Saleem, N., Jan, S.A., Atif, M.J., Khurshid, H., Khan, S.A., Abdullah, M., Jahanzaib, M., Ahmed, H., Ullah, S.F., Iqbal, A., Naqi, S., Ilyas, M. 70potential for seeds/silique, 1000-seed weight and seed yield/plant, respectively, so these genotypes are recommended for future breeding programs for achieving promising results.