Introduction Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is produced as major crop in Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan, and to a lesser extent in many countries of Europe, the Middle East, northern Africa, as well as in South America. It is extensively cultivated and naturalised in the Middle East countries of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon and in Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Libya...

Introduction In Italy, grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is one of the least common grain legumes. Today, it is not included in the official statistics of Italy and its survival is due to the praiseworthy action of a small number of farmers in very limited areas of peninsular and insular centralsouthern Italy. Since the Second World War the sharp reduction in cultivation, similarly for other grain...

grasspea (lathyrus sativus) is a protein-rich forage legume that contains a neurotoxin (beta-odap) that causes severe malformation of the body’s extremities when eaten in large quantities. various low-toxin lines of grasspea have been developed to reduce the toxin’s concentration in the grain, i.e. to below the 0.2% critical value, but there are indications that zinc (zn) can also reduce the to...

Introduction Although isozyme markers may not be abundant in a species, their codominant inheritance has made them useful in certain situations. In linkage mapping experiments, codominant markers are often preferred over dominant markers as they carry more information on the recombination fraction than dominant markers in the F2 segregating population . An inheritance study will provide allelic...

Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L., 2n = 14) has great agronomic potential because of its ability to survive under extreme conditions, such as drought and flood. However, this legume is less investigated because of its sparse genomic resources and very slow breeding process. In this study, 570 million quality-filtered and trimmed cDNA sequence reads with total length of over 82 billion bp were obtai...

The second occurs in late spring and early summer (May to June) when wheat has ceased growth and warm-seaThis study was conducted to determine seasonal forage production son pastures are not yet available for grazing (Northup, and nutritive value of the cool-season annual legumes grasspea (Lath2003). New plant species that can fill these gaps with yrus sativus L. cv. AC-Greenfix) and lentil (Le...

Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L.) is an underutilized pulse crop which can withstand adverse environmental conditions such as drought, heat, salinity, waterlogging, pest and diseases. To facilitate hybridization studies, pollen cryoconservation was attempted in L. sativus. Among the different media combination tested for vitro germination, BK medium with 15% sucrose optimal. Pollen viability at st...

Introduction Knowledge about genetic diversity is a prerequisite of any breeding programme. Inclusion of diverse parents in hybridisation programmes serves the purpose of combining desirable genes in new recombinations. Mahalanobi’s D statistic (7) is a powerful tool in quantifying the degree of divergence at genotypic level. Several workers have used this method to quantify the degree of diver...