Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important food and rotation crop in many parts of the world. Cold (freezing and chilling temperatures) and Ascochyta blight (Didymella rabiei) are the major constraints in chickpea production. The effects of temperature stresses on chickpea susceptibility and pathogen aggressiveness are not well documented in the Cicer-Didymella pathosystem. Two experiments w...

Drought and salinity are the major factors that limit chickpea production worldwide. We performed whole transcriptome analyses of chickpea genotypes to investigate the molecular basis of drought and salinity stress response/adaptation. Phenotypic analyses confirmed the contrasting responses of the chickpea genotypes to drought or salinity stress. RNA-seq of the roots of drought and salinity rel...

Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceri and Meloidogyne javanica are important pathogens of chickpea. Interrelationships between Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceri and M. javanica were investigated on 53 Fusarium wilt-resistant chickpea genotypes in pot experiments. All of the genotypes were susceptible to M. javanica. Fusarium wilt resistance in one genotype (ICC 12275) was ineffective in the presence ...

A field experiment with two sets, each comprising 13 chickpea genotypes with three replications was carried out during Rabi 2012-2013 in stress and non-stress conditions. The objective of the reported research was to study the response of chickpea genotypes in drought stress and to screen the appropriate genotypes performing better in water deficit and irrigated conditions. Three genotypes TG12...

Genetic diversity analysis of chickpea germplasm can provide practical information for the selection of parental material and thus assist in planning breeding strategies. Chickpea seed is a good source of carbohydrates and proteins, constituting 80% of the total dry seed weight. Released cultivars and advanced lines of 30 chickpea genotypes were subjected to RAPD analysis for assessment of gene...

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important grain legume crop but its sustainable production is challenged by predicted climate changes, which are likely to increase production limitations and uncertainty in yields. Characterising the variability in root architectural traits in a core collection of chickpea germplasm will provide the basis for breeding new germplasm with suitable root traits ...

Abstract The chickpea, Cicer arietinum L. (Fabales: Fabaceae), seeds are vulnerable, both in the field and in storage, to attack by seed-beetles. Beetles of the genus Callosobruchus are major storage pests of chickpea crops and cause considerable economic losses. In the present study, a total of 11 chickpea genotypes including five 'kabuli' (Mexican white, Diyar, CA 2969, ILC 8617 and ACC 245) ...

Chickpea is mostly grown on stored soil moisture, and deep/profuse rooting has been hypothesized for almost three decades to be critical for improving chickpea tolerance to terminal drought. However, temporal patterns of water use that leave water available for reproduction and grain filling could be equally critical. Therefore, variation in water use pattern and root depth/density were measure...

Expressed sequence tags simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs) are important sources for investigation of genetic diversity and molecular marker development. Similar to genomic SSRs, the EST-SSRs are useful markers for many applications in genetics and plant breeding such as genetic diversity analysis, molecular mapping and cross-transferability across related species and genera. In spite of low po...

Genetic diversity of 27 chickpea genotypes was studied through Mahalanobis D and Principal Component analysis. The genotypes under study fall into five clusters. The cluster II contained the highest number of genotypes (11) and Cluster I contained the lowest. Cluster I produced the highest mean value for number of pods per plant. The inter cluster distances were much higher than the intra clust...