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Populations in North India depend on a number of vegetable crops of which Amaranthus spp. is the most important since it is the only crop available in the hot summer months when no other foliage crop grows in the field. However, reports on mineral composition of leaves are rare with absolutely no information on the qualitative improvement of foliage yield with special reference to minerals. Studies on correlation among the minerals as well as with yield and leaf attributes are also lacking. Hence, we report the proximate mineral composition in 30 strains of A. tricolor along with some suggestions for qualitative improvement of the foliage yield with reference to minerals. Our study showed that vegetable amaranth is a rich source of minerals like calcium (1.7± 0.04 g/100 g), iron (1233.8 ± 50.02 mg/kg), and zinc (791.7 ± 28.98 mg/kg). The heritability estimates were high for most of the traits, with potassium and calcium showing high values, while comparatively lower values were recorded for magnesium and nickel. Nickel was the only mineral that showed positive correlation with all the minerals, as well as with leaf size and foliage yield. Zinc showed strong positive relationship with iron (0.66**) and manganese (0.74**), and was the only mineral exhibiting significant positive association with foliage yield. This study would be of use in enhancement of selected minerals in different regions according to local preferences and nutrient deficiency prevalent among the populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To incorporate durable resistance against bacterial blight, a major disease rice, three resistance genes, xa 5, xa13 and Xa21, from IRBB 60 were transferred through marker-assisted backcrossing using RG 556, RG 136 and pTA248 markers linked to the three genes to supplement the Xa4 gene present in Lalat, a popular rice cultivar. Effective selection enabled the transfer in three back-crosses and a generation of selfing and background selection employing morphological and grain quality traits and molecular markers, led to >90 % recovery of the recurrent parental genome. The gene pyramids exhibited high levels of resistance against the pathogen in multi-location evaluation trials conducted over several locations of bacterial blight in India. IL-2 (CRMAS2621-7-1), a gene pyramid, was identified as being promising for several endemic regions of bacterial blight and was released as Improved Lalat in one of the identified regions. The success of the study demonstrates the vast potential of marker-assisted selection for gene stacking and recovery of the parental genome with high precision.