Executive Summary : | Peas are low-cost, easily available source of proteins, vitamins, minerals and carbohydrate, making them a valuable food for meeting nutritional needs of about 900 million undernourished people worldwide. To keep pace with the rising population while sustaining food and nutritional security, future of this vegetable is especially important to India's economy, since most people are vegetarian who receive their protein from protein-rich foods like peas. Further, despite a substantial increase in area and production a slight shift has been observed in its productivity (7.7 to 7.8 t/ha green peas) since 2001 to 2019 (FAO, 2019). Conclusively, it is important to offer a proper emphasis on breeding varieties with novel agronomic variations that could break yield stagnation barriers of existing cultivars. Inflorescence characteristics like total number of flowering nodes/plant and number of flowers/node are responsive to improvement, as these traits directly affect the yield/plant. With very limited variation in the flower number/node, most of pea genotypes generally have single or double flower/node, and multi-flowers (MF i.e. bearing more than two flowers or pod on a single peduncle) is rarest trait reported in Pisum. ICAR-IIVR, Varanasi is pioneer Institute to develop unique MF pea genotypes viz., ‘VRPM-905-1’ (INGR19077) bearing 3-5 pods/peduncle and ‘VRP-500’ (INGR15009) bearing 3 pods/peduncle, also been registered with NBPGR, New Delhi. Yield stability of these genotypes showed the genotype ‘VRPM–901–5’ produced potential yield of 227 q/ha mainly attributed by its high flower and pods, was nearly 3-times to single flower genotype (VRPSel–17) and 1.5-times to double flower commercial cultivars, respectively. Therefore, MF trait has economic relevance for enhancement of overall pod & seed yield in many legumes including peas. Unfortunately, despite its possible influence on yield, its regulation has not yet been properly deciphered due to lack of precise information about the genetic control of MF in Pisum. Keeping its relevance to future breeding, it is necessary to study the major loci/ QTLs involved in this novel economic trait as a very early step. Further, to speed up the breeding procedure that too with great accuracy, integration of available genomic tools is the need of the hour. With recent advances in NGS technology, genome complexity reduction methods such as genotyping by sequencing (GBS), have emerged as an effective approach to offer large number of markers for immediate applications in gene/QTL discovery that can further utilize in genomic-assisted breeding. Thus, the present project is proposed to map the QTLs responsible for MF trait using GBS approach, for genotyping RILs derived from two different MF mapping population (VRP–386 ×VRP–500 and VRPSel–17×VRPM–901–5) developed from four parents, contrasting for number of flowers per peduncle, flower colour, pod & seed yield as well as for other horticultural traits. |
Co-PI: | Dr. Vidya Sagar, ICAR-Indian Institute Of Vegetable Research, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh-221305, Dr. Rakesh Kumar Dubey, ICAR-Indian Institute Of Vegetable Research, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh-221305 |