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Background: United Nations SDG-2 and SDG-3 pledges to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and reduce premature deaths of children persisting amongst 821 million people globally. Chickpeas, the second largest food legume in the world, are important due to dietary, therapeutic and health values since Roman times and are ideal source of protein, carbohydrate, minerals and ß-carotene. Therefore, it is central to alleviate malnutrition and ensuring good health. Methods: We conducted experiments during Rabi crop season 2018-19 and 2019-20 and studied proximate nutritional compositions such as protein, its bioavailability enhancement procedures, optimum sprouting stage and potential genotypes. The present series experiment as 6th one was undertaken to find out the impacts of varying seed seedlings germination stages at 0, 3 and 6 days on observed estimates of protein contents in 12 potential genotypes of chickpea including Pusa-256 as standard (control) check. Result: We noticed erosion of reserved seed nutrients activating seedling growth and enhancing nutritional values, observed protein in the range of 18.96 to 28.69%, discovered 6 days sprouts giving highest digestible protein and identified genotypes BG-1092, ICC-11378, JG-74 as potential resources to be utilized in breeding programmes for harnessing their genetic potentials for enriching protein and other nutritional components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: STMS markers and morphological traits were used to investigate the genetic relationship and allelic diversity in chickpea. In this study, we focused on the selection and more efficient utilization of core germplasm in breeding programs for chickpea crop improvement using STMS and quantitative/morphological traits. Methods: Seeds of elite accessions of chickpea were obtained from ICRISAT, Patancheru, Andhra Pradesh, India. 50 STMS markers and 11 quantitative traits were used for exploring the genetic variability and relationship in 35 chickpea accessions. Result: A total of 97 alleles were produced out of the 32 polymorphic STMS loci with an average of 3.03 alleles per locus ranging between 2-6 alleles per primer. The PIC value ranged from 0.029 to 0.768 with an average of 0.502. PIC value showed a highly positive correlation (r = 0.718) with number of alleles at the STMS loci. In both molecular and morphological markers/traits-based clustering, out of 35 chickpea accessions only one accession ICC-13892 was isolated at the end of clustering. The results indicated that highly polymorphic microsatellite markers NCPGR 68, NCPGR 50, NCPGR 81, NCPGR 48 and NCPGR 77 along with the accessions ICC-13892 having distant associations with ICC-13816, ICC-15697, ICC-15610, ICC-15868, ICC-15888, ICC-15996 with novel findings should be useful resources for strategies of allele mining, association genetics, mapping and cloning of gene(s) and in applied breeding to broaden the genetic base of chickpea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiments were conducted to evaluate response of two genetically different drought tolerant varieties of Cicer arietinum L. namely PUSA 1103, Desi variety and PUSA 1105, Kabuli variety to the basal applications of nickel chloride doses viz; 0, 0.62, 3.12, 12.5, 62.5 and 125 µg g-1. Significant increase in the growth was observed at 0.62 and 3.12 µg g-1 nickel chloride doses. Addition of nickel dose above this level reduced the leaf area, plant growth, root length and yield of the plants. Fruiting stage showed more severe toxicity symptoms in comparison to the vegetative stages. Protein contents in seeds and chlorophyll contents along with nitrate reductase activity increased significantly in the leaves at the lower nickel doses. Peroxidase and superoxide-dismutase activities increased in a concomitant manner with increasing nickel concentrations. Increased concentrations of the soil applied nickel demonstrated an increase in the content of nickel higher in shoots also followed by roots. Accumulation of nickel and grain yield was higher in Desi chickpea variety PUSA 1103, indicating for its potential utilization in crop improvement strategies to breed new chickpea genotypes for nickel and drought resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chickpea is one of the most important pulse crops in the world. However, chickpea productivity is not high enough to fulfill the requirements of an ever-increasing demand. One of the major constraints in the chickpea improvement is the narrow genetic base in the cultivated chickpea (Cicer arietinum L) and its sexual incompatibility with other Cicer species. Knowledge of molecular characterization, genetic diversity, and relatedness in the germplasm is a prerequisite for varietal registration, protection and overall crop improvement. The present study reports molecular characterization of 75 genotypes using 46 STMS markers. All the STMS loci were found to be highly polymorphic. A total of 132 alleles were found with an average of 2.87 per locus. The highest numbers of alleles were observed with marker TA-21. A cluster analysis arranged these 75 genotypes in 7 clusters. The genotypes ICRISAT 3073 and Pusa 212 showed remarkable genetic similarity (0.796) and the largest genetic distance was observed between C. reticulatum wild-1 and CSG 9505 (0.547). The present analysis provides an insight into the interrelationship among the genotypes and highlights the requirement for effective supplementation of morphological data with additional molecular markers to efficiently unearth the genetic inter-relationship among the genotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]