Browsing by Author "Francis, Philip"

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    Identification of a stable drought-tolerant high-yielding line for chickpea crop improvement
    (Springer Nature Publishing AG, 2025) Gupta, Santosh Kumar; Dwivedi, Vikas; Kute, Nandakumar Surendra; Francis, Philip; Parida, Swarup K.; Chattopadhyay, Debasis
    Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is grown in marginal land with low input and is, therefore, drought-prone. In order to develop a drought-tolerant line, a bi-parental recombinant inbred line (RIL) mapping population was generated by inter-crossing between two varieties JGK3 (ICCV 95334) and Himchana1 (ICCX-810800) having contrasting root traits. Ninety-two genetically diverse RILs of F8 generation were selected based on their total root length to root dry weight ratio (RL/DW). The leaf relative water content of these RILs under low soil moisture did not show any strong correlation with the RL/DW. Twenty RILs having high RL/DW were evaluated for seed yield in a field under rainfed condition without any supplementary irrigation. The best performing RIL, which performed better than the check varieties, was reevaluated for a further year under rainfed condition. The genotypic constitution of this superior low soil moisture tolerant individual RIL was determined by constructing its recombination map using genome-wide SNPs obtained through genotyping-by-sequencing. The RIL possesses the superior alleles of the genomic QTL region known to govern drought tolerance in chickpea. The phenotypic and genotypic characterization of RILs in our study identified a chickpea pre-breeding line that can be used as a genetic donor for developing drought-tolerant high-yielding chickpea varieties and our results provide an evidence that total root length to root dry weight ratio can be used as a quantitative trait for assessing drought tolerance.
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    Uncovering DNA methylation landscapes to decipher evolutionary footprints of phenotypic diversity in chickpea
    (Oxford University Press, 2024) Daware, Anurag; Mohanty, Jitendra K.; Narnoliya, Laxmi; Singh, Akansha; Rathore, Deepanshi; Thakro, Virevol; Francis, Aleena; Singh, Nagendra Pratap; Francis, Philip; Tripathi, Shailesh; Chattopadhyay, Debasis; Parida, Swarup K.
    Genetic diversity and environmental factors are long believed to be the dominant contributor to phenotypic diversity in crop plants. However, it has been recently established that, besides genetic variation, epigenetic variation, especially variation in DNA methylation, plays a significant role in determining phenotypic diversity in crop plants. Therefore, assessing DNA methylation diversity in crop plants becomes vital, especially in the case of crops like chickpea, which has a narrow genetic base. Thus, in the present study, we employed whole-genome bisulfite sequencing to assess DNA methylation diversity in wild and cultivated (desi and kabuli) chickpea. This revealed extensive DNA methylation diversity in both wild and cultivated chickpea. Interestingly, the methylation diversity was found to be significantly higher than genetic diversity, suggesting its potential role in providing vital phenotypic diversity for the evolution and domestication of the Cicer gene pool. The phylogeny based on DNA methylation variation also indicates a potential complementary role of DNA methylation variation in addition to DNA sequence variation in shaping chickpea evolution. Besides, the study also identified diverse epi-alleles of many previously known genes of agronomic importance. The Cicer MethVarMap database developed in this study enables researchers to readily visualize methylation variation within the genes and genomic regions of their interest (http://223.31.159.7/cicer/public/). Therefore, epigenetic variation like DNA methylation variation can potentially explain the paradox of high phenotypic diversity despite the narrow genetic base in chickpea and can potentially be employed for crop improvement.