Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹University School of Biotechnology, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Dwarka Sector 16C, New Delhi-110075, India; ²Present Address- International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, Patancheru-502324, India.

Email

prof.pcsharma@gmail.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received January 07, 2012; Accepted January 07, 2012; Published January 20, 2012

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is an important food legume crop, particularly for the arid regions including Indian subcontinent. Considering the detrimental effect of drought, temperature and salt stress on crop yield, efforts have been initiated in the direction of developing improved varieties and designing alternate strategies to sustain chickpea production in adverse environmental conditions. Identification of genes that confer abiotic stress tolerance in plants remains a challenge in contemporary plant breeding. The present study focused on the identification of abiotic stress responsive genes in chickpea based on sequence similarity approach exploiting known abiotic stress responsive genes from model crops or other plant species. Ten abiotic stress responsive genes identified in other plants were partially amplified from eight chickpea genotypes and their presence in chickpea was confirmed after sequencing the PCR products. These genes have been functionally validated and reported to play significant role in stress response in model plants like Arabidopsis, rice and other legume crops. Chickpea EST sequences available at NCBI EST database were used for the identification of abiotic stress responsive genes. A total of 8,536 unique coding long sequences were used for identification of chickpea homologues of these abiotic stress responsive genes by sequence similarity search blast (BlastN and BlastX). These genes can be further explored towards achieving the goal of developing superior chickpea varieties providing improved yields under stress conditions using modern molecular breeding approaches.

Keywords

Chickpea, Abiotic stress, Candidate genes, Sequence similarity

Citation

Roorkiwal & Sharma, Bioinformation 8(2): 092-097 (2012)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.