Molecular and phenotypic diversity among chickpea (Cicer arietinum) genotypes as a function of drought tolerance

Abstract

Diversity as a function of drought tolerance may be identified by morphological characters, and molecular tools used to find the most divergent genotypes for breeding programs for drought tolerance in future. The narrow genetic base of chickpea can be circumvented by using diverse lines in breeding programs. Forty chickpea genotypes were studied for their morphological and molecular diversity with an objective of identifying the most diverse drought-tolerant lines. In total, 90 alleles were detected with 3.6 alleles per locus. Polymorphism information content (PIC) values ranged from 0.155 to 0.782 with an average value of 0.4374 per locus. The size of amplified products ranged from 160 bp to 390 bp. Primer TA136 with eight alleles showed the highest PIC value of 0.7825, indicating its ability to differentiate the genotypes at molecular level. DARwin neighbour-joining tree analysis based on dissimilarity estimates was done for the molecular data and sequential agglomerative hierarchical non-overlapping (SAHN) grouping for the morphological data. It could clearly discriminate the tolerance and the sensitivity of genotypes. Two-dimensional principal coordinates analysis (PCoA) plot indicated good diversity for drought tolerance. The genetic similarity coefficients ranged from 0.115 (genotypes BGD72 to ICCV 5308) to 0.828 (genotypes ICCV 10316 to ICCV 92337).

SSR markers in revealing extent of genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships among chickpea core collection accessions for Western Himalayas

“…Similar to our results the average PIC values of 0.77, 0.75, 0.75, 0.72, were observed by [13,29,35,43], respectively. Comparatively, a high average PIC value of 0.854 has been reported by [30], and [17,36,[44][45] revealed an average PIC value of 0.53, 0.60, 0.68, and 0.43, respectively which is relatively less than that of the present study.…”

Genetic mapping of QTLs for drought tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

“…In the present study, the pooled ANOVA for all measured traits, including root-related traits, showed highly significant differences between genotypes under irrigated and rainfed conditions at both locations. Combined ANOVA in several studies also showed significant differences for various morphological and physiological traits (Hamwieh et al, 2013;Pang et al, 2017;Purushothaman et al, 2017;Sachdeva et al, 2018) and for root-related traits (Varshney et al, 2014;Purushothaman et al, 2017). Significant differences were also observed for genotype × environment (G × E) interactions for almost all the measured traits including root-related traits.…”

Characterization of ASR gene and its role in drought tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

“…Relatively lesser decrease in MSI was observed in BGD72 (7.69%), ICCV10 (9.09%) and ICCV3311 (12%) with higher RWC (%) signifying their tolerance to drought. RWC and MSI have been suggested for screening the germplasm for drought tolerance [2]. Drought stress also hinders photosynthetic machinery of plants by bringing about changes in the chlorophyll content [47].…”

“…Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), one of the earliest food legume crop with a diploid chromosome number of 16 is cultivated in the tropics all over the world [1] and belongs to the family Fabaceae [2]. India being the largest producer of chickpea produces 68% of the total world production and about 9.21Mha area is under chickpea cultivation producing 8.88Mt [3].…”