The growing demand for sustainable animal production is compelling researchers to explore the potential approaches to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from livestock that are mainly produced by enteric fermentation. Some potential solutions, for instance, the use of chemical inhibitors to reduce methanogenesis, are not feasible in routine use due to their toxicity to ruminants, inhibition of efficient rumen function or other transitory effects. Strategies, such as use of plant secondary metabolites and dietary manipulations have emerged to reduce the methane emission, but these still require extensive research before these can be recommended and deployed in the livestock industry sector. Furthermore, immunization vaccines for methanogens and phages are also under investigation for mitigation of enteric methanogenesis. The increasing knowledge of methanogenic diversity in rumen, DNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics have paved the way for chemogenomic strategies by targeting methane producers. Chemogenomics will help in finding target enzymes and proteins, which will further assist in the screening of natural as well chemical inhibitors. The construction of a methanogenic gene catalogue through these approaches is an attainable objective. This will lead to understand the microbiome function, its relation with the host and feeds, and therefore, will form the basis of practically viable and eco-friendly methane mitigation approaches, while improving the ruminant productivity.

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The systematic exploration of microbial ecosystem of the rumen was commenced by the father of rumen microbiology, Robert Hungate, in 1950s. His contributions toward the development of anaerobic culture techniques have illustrated the ways to explore the complex microbial structures of the rumen and other anaerobic ecosystems. The understanding of rumen microbiology has strengthened an awareness to improve the feed utilization and manipulation of microbial compositions. Microbes and their interactions in interspecies H 2 transfers were fi rst studied in the rumen ecosystems and attracted pioneers to investigate the alternate abatement strategies of methane production along with enhanced animal productivity. The discovery of alternate hydrogenotrophs and industrially important novel microbes and the management of rumen disorders via microbial manipulations make this community an interesting research platform for different microbial theories. The discovery of anaerobic fungi as a part of rumen fl ora by Orpin during the 1970s disproved their mistaken identity as fl agellated protozoa and the concept that all fungi are aerobic organisms.

The objective of the present study is to detect genetic impurity in the seed lots of CMS lines, restorers and hybrids and to identify signature markers to differentiate parents and hybrids through DNA-based assays. Furthermore, attempts have been made to find out an alternative to Grow-Out-Test, which is very tedious, time consuming and used conventionally for seed genetic purity testing since beginning of quality seed multiplication chain. Fifty-one rice-specific sequence tagged microsatellite (STMS) primer pairs distributed throughout the rice genome were employed for fingerprinting of eight rice hybrids and their parental lines with a view to assess variation within parental lines and to test the genetic purity of the commercial seed lots. Among those, 51 markers, 28 microsatellite markers showed polymorphism (54.90 %). A total of 98 alleles were obtained with an average of 1.92 alleles per primer pair and number of alleles amplified for each primer pair ranged from 1 to 4. A set of markers were identified to differentiate parental lines of the hybrids and which emphasizes the immense scope of those molecular markers for their use in the unambiguous identification of hybrid, which would be of great benefit to farmers that depend on the hybrids.

Among the cool season legume crops grown in India and the Indian sub-continent, peas are very popular and preferred by the growers as well as consumers for various uses. The third largest area in pea cultivation is occupied by India after Canada and Russia. Among the important and popular varieties of peas that are grown in India, several are from exotic background. But very little work has been done to carry out the genetic diversity present in the widely adapted Indian pea varieties using DNA markers. Twenty-four most popular and widely adapted varieties were subjected to RAPD analysis to find out the genetic relatedness among them using 60 decamer primers. All the primers used in our study were found to be polymorphic and seven of them showed 100% polymorphism. Out of 579 amplified products, 433 showed polymorphism (74.8%). On an average, 9.65 bands were amplified per primer. Cluster analysis based on Jaccard's similarity coefficient using UPGMA grouped all the tall type varieties together, whereas, dwarf types formed two different clusters based upon their pedigree. The arithmetic mean heterozygosity (Hav) value and marker index (MI) was found to be 0.496 and 4.787, respectively, thus this indicated the efficiency of RAPD as a marker system. Moreover, the calculated value of probability of identical match by chance suggested that about 10(53) genotypes can be unambiguously distinguish by employing 60 RAPD primers.