Improving drought tolerance in chickpea

for Africa and Asia

Pooran Gaur Project Delivery Coordinator

ICRISAT, Patancheru, India

on behalf of Chickpea Group

GCP Challenge Initiative

Target countries for chickpea CI

India

Ethiopia

Kenya

Tanzania

Various projects linked to chickpea CI

G6007.04/G6010.04: Tropical Legumes I (TL I) - Objective 4: Chickpea

Phase 1&2 (2007- 2014)

PI and Lead Institute: Rajeev Varshney, ICRISAT

G4008.12: Linking genetic diversity with phenotype for drought tolerance

in reference collection (2008 - 2011)

PI and Lead Institute: L Krishnamurthy, ICRISAT

G7009.02: Mapping and validation of QTL for drought tolerance traits

(2009 -2011)

PI and Lead Institute: Pooran Gaur, ICRISAT

G7009.06: Development of a SNP platform (Nov 2009-Oct 2011)

PI and Lead Institute: Doug Cook, UC-Davis

TL-I complementary project in India - funded by The Dept. of

Biotechnology, Govt. of India (2011-14)

PI and Lead Institute: Rajeev Varshney, ICRISAT

Major Activities

1. Development of genetic and genomic

resources

2. Identification and validation of markers

associated with QTL for drought tolerance

traits

3. Marker-assisted introgression of drought

tolerance traits in farmer-preferred cultivars

4. Marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS)

for cumulating favorable alleles for drought

tolerance

• 1655 novel SSR markers

developed and validated. With

these the total number of SSR

markers available for chickpea

is over 2500

• GoldenGate assay for 768 SNPs

developed

• 2486 KASPar SNPs were

designed. 1484 SNPs were

found polymorphic in a set of

94 genotypes.

Development of molecular

markers for chickpea

Homozygote

Heterozygote

Homozygote NTC

Development of high density linkage map

chickpea

1291 loci were mapped on to eight linkage groups

The total map distance ~845.5 cM

Average inter marker distance 0.6 cM/marker

Development of MAGIC lines

No. of crosses

28 2-way

14 4-way

7 8-way

>1000 F2 plants from 8-way crosses are currently being grown in a greenhouse

(A) ICC 4958 (B) ICCV 10 (C) JAKI 9218 (D) JG 11

(E) JG 130 (F) JG 16 (G) ICCV 97105 (H) ICCV 00108

8 Parents used in development of MAGIC lines

GA

24

S

TM

S11

TA

A17

0

N12

1

GA

24

TA

A17

0

N14

2

Identified and validation of drought QTL

ICC 283 × ICC 8261

ICC 4958 × ICC 1882 QTL for

Root traits

Harvest Index

Yield related traits

Δ13C

Cross: Cultivars x Donors for root traits

(Confirm hybrids)

BC1: Cultivar x F1

↓

BC1F1

(Foreground and background selection)

BC 2: Cultivar x BC1F1

↓

BC2F1

(Foreground and background selection)

BC3: Cultivar x BC2F1

↓

BC3F1

(Foreground and background selection)

↓

BC3F2

(Selected homozygous plants for QTL-linked markers)

↓

2010/11 BC3F3

Seed multiplication and preliminary evaluation

↓

2011/12 Multilocation evaluation of BC3F4 lines

MABC for improving drought tolerance

Donors

Cultivars

JG 11

Chefe KAK 2

Evaluation of MABC lines

for root traits

Vertical bars denote standard error of differences. The means were significantly different at 0.001 level and were

based on 8 replicated cylinders with 2 plants in each cylinder)

Donor line Elite line

Donor line Elite line

MABC lines

MABC lines

MABC being run by NARS in TL-I Phase II

Egerton University - Kenya

ICCV 95423 × ICC 4958

ICCV 97105 × ICC 4958

DZARC - Ethiopia

Ejere × ICC 4958

Areti × ICC 4958

IIPR-Kanpur

DCP 92-3 ×ICC 4958

IARI-New Delhi

Pusa 362×ICC 4958

MARS for improving drought tolerance

2 Crosses

2008/09 Genotyping of F3 plants

2009/10 F4 (Seed mutiplication)

2010/11 Multilocation evaluation

(Ethiopia, Kenya, India) of F5

progenies and QTL analysis

2011/12 Selection and inter-crossing

of selected lines

•

Two good-by-good crosses involving cultivars from

Africa and Asia

28 new crosses available for initiating MARS

Workshop on “Modern Breeding Technologies for Chickpea

Improvement” held during Oct 25 – Nov 19, 2010

16 scientists participated

12 from five countries of

Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya,

Tanzania, Malawi,Algeria)

and 4 from four

countries of Asia (India,

Nepal, Bangladesh,

Myanmar)

Included lectures, demo, field/lab visits, comprehensive data analysis,

interaction with different subject matter specialists at ICRISAT

Capacity building:

Modern breeding workshop

Kenya:

- Ms Serah Songok, PhD student, Egerton University

- Ms Alice Koskie, PhD student, WACCI

- Mr Moses Oyier, MSc student, Egerton University

Ethiopia:

- Mr Musa Jarso, PhD student, Addis Ababa University

- Mr Kebede Teshome, PhD student, Haramaya Uni.

- Mr Getachew Tilahun, Addis Ababa University

Capacity Building:

Degree students

Field trial and data management

• 11 datasets compiled and curated

• Trait ontology made available

• Pedigree information of ICRISAT’s chickpea breeding

program moved to ICIS

• Plan to use IB Fieldbook from coming crop season

• Handheld evaluated and keen to use Galaxy tab 10.1

Linkages with TL-II

• Key partners are common

• Joint capacity building on

integrated breeding of

chickpea

• Products from TL-I already

being integrated in TL-II

activities

The Chickpea CoP was established at the TL-I annual

meeting in Madrid during May 2011.

CoP Coordinator: Pooran Gaur, ICRISAT

CoP Mentor: Teresa Milan, Universidad de Cordoba, Spain

Aim: to promote knowledge sharing and mutual learning

on integrated chickpea breeding

Community of Practice (CoP) for

integrated breeding of chickpea

Partners in Chickpea CI

• ICRISAT- Patancheru, India (Pooran Gaur, Rajeev Varshney, L

Krisnamurthy, Vincent Vadez, Hari Upadhyaya, Trushar Shah, C

Sivakumar, M Thudi)

- Nairobi, Kenya (NVPR Ganga Rao)

• Egerton University, Kenya: (Paul Kimurto)

• EIAR, Ethiopia (Asnake Fikre)

• LZARDI, Tanzania (Robert Kileo)

• UAS-Bangalore, India (KP Vishwanatha, MS Sheshashaye)

• ANGRAU-Hyderabad, India (Veera Jayalakshmi)

• IIPR-Kanpur, India (SK Chaturvedi, Aditya Garg)

• IARI-New Delhi (Shailesh Tripathi, Ch Bharadwaj, J Kumar)

• RSKVV-Gwalior, India (M Yasin)

• RAU-Bikaner, India (SJ Singh)

• UC−Davis, USA (Doug Cook)

• University of Frankfurt, Germany (Peter Winter, Guenter Kahl)

• JIRCAS, Japan (Satoshi Tobita, Osamu Ito)

• DArT P/L (Andrzej Killian)