Browsing by Author "Chaurasia, Shiksha"

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Emerging roles of melatonin in mitigating salinity stress of legumes
(Elsevier B.V., 2023) Chaurasia, Shiksha; Sapna, Sapna; Padhy, Asish Kumar; Bhatia, Sabhyata
Melatonin (N-acetyl-5‑methoxy tryptamine) is a multi-functional molecule that is distributed in all living organisms and it performs essential roles in environmental stress tolerance. Salt stress enhances the rapid accumulation of melatonin in plants. Melatonin provides resistance to salt stress by manipulating various regulatory mechanisms at the biochemical and molecular levels throughout different plant developmental stages. Conventionally, legumes are consumed along with cereal-based staples to ensure wholesome nutritional intake. After confirming their nutritional and health-promoting effects, recently their demand is constantly increasing. This has guided the researchers to focus on developing legumes to cope with the changing climate scenario. In legumes, melatonin concentration varies from crop to crop under salt stress. This review emphasizes melatonin biosynthesis in plants with a special focus on legumes and their responses to endogenous and exogenous melatonin application. This manuscript also throws light on the physiological, biochemical, and molecular basis of melatonin-mediated salinity stress tolerance in legumes. The future directions for enhancing the salt stress tolerance in legumes are also discussed. As, Melatonin promotes germination potential, seedling biomass, photosynthesis rate, pod number, and yield of legumes under the influence of salinity stress, this review can provide insights for using melatonin to develop salt stress tolerant legumes for sustainable food production.
Innovations in industrial and functional food applications of lentil in the era of biofortification
(Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2025) Padhy, Asish Kumar; Chaurasia, Shiksha; Manivannan, Abinaya; Tripathi, Kuldeep; Sapna, Sapna; Bhatia, Sabhyata
Lentil can serve as a prebiotic and therapeutic healthy food due to the presence of essential micronutrients, functional proteins, minerals, and carbohydrates, as well as phytochemicals that have shown to be promising in the prevention of several chronic diseases. Nutraceutical properties derived from the phytochemicals present in lentil has expanded its scope of usage to a broader perspective. In this regard, a lot of innovations have been carried out to use lentil in the form of crisps, chips, bakery products, yogurt, pasta, including in the brewing industries. Eforts are being carried out to develop meat analogs out of lentil four. However, niche area specifc consumer preferences have limited its explorations in other innovative areas. This will also necessitate developing genetic resources and varieties aligning to the needs of producers and consumers with acceptable sensory properties. Hence, demand driven development of breeding materials for biofortifcation and crop improvement programs needs considerable amount of investment in research and development of the crop. This review is a campedium of innovations in development of industrial, functional food products from lentil along with their nutritional properties and sensory acceptability serve a foundation for the researchers to invent more to popularize lentil among the consumers to ensure nutritional security.
Key determinants of seed size for enhancing genetic gain in legumes
(John Wiley & Sons, 2026) Padhy, Asish Kumar; Singh, Ananya; Chaurasia, Shiksha; Parida, Swarup Kumar; Tripathi, Kuldeep; Bhatia, Sabhyata
Legumes play a pivotal role in human nutrition due to their high nutritional value, especially protein content. Therefore, enhancing the productivity of grain legumes is desirable for ensuring food and nutritional security. Seed size and seed weight are key factors influencing productivity. This article consolidates the substantial amount of research conducted to uncover the molecular signatures associated with seed size into a structured format, providing a one-stop platform of available resources for enhancing genetic gains in legumes. The advent of NGS technologies enabled the decryption of genomes and transcriptomes of important grain legumes. Moreover, molecular signatures such as SSRs, SNPs, transcription factors, methylation patterns and so forth scanned from phenotypically and genotypically well-characterized natural and mapping populations helped identify the QTLs, MTAs and candidate genes associated with seed size. Many of these QTLs and candidate genes have been utilized in marker-assisted breeding for achieving larger seeds and enhanced yield in legumes. Besides, the characterization of legume orthologs of candidate genes from other crops using different omics approaches helped in understanding the regulatory pathways involved in seed size determination in legumes. This review provides a direction for the effective utilization of available resources to enhance legume productivity.
Use of wild relatives in breeding programs to develop climate resilient wheat
(Elsevier B.V., 2025) Chaurasia, Shiksha; Bhatia, Sabhyata
The changing climate is having a significant impact on wheat production. This impact is not limited to increasing heat and drought stress but also includes other stresses, extreme weather events, and adverse conditions. To meet the growing food demands of a rising population, wheat breeding requires incorporating new, diversified resources that can produce high-quality wheat in various stressful environments. Wild relatives that are genetically similar are countless resources for improving yield-related traits and increasing tolerance to environmental stress. By using wild relatives to introduce genes into widely grown crops and contribute to environmental tolerance, we can develop crops resilient to climate change. In this chapter, we confer the impression of climate change on wheat production, as well as its wild relatives. We also highlight the challenges of hybridization, such as genetic distance, crossover frequencies, and selecting desirable traits while minimizing linkage drag. Finally, we deliver an index of valuable traits that could exist in these species and potentially be exploited through interspecific hybridization approaches. Here is an outline of how introgression works and what factors distress the breeding approach. We will also discuss optimization methods to increase the chances of recovering desired climate-resilient introgressive lines in wheat improvement programs.