Application of biotechnological tools

Fungal diseases are the most important biotic factors limiting crop production in chickpea and pigeonpea. Nearly 172 pathogens attack chickpea, which includes 67 species of fungi. Pigeonpea is attacked by more than 100 plant pathogens, including 50 species of fungi. Our research mainly tackles economically important fungal diseases of chickpea and pigeonpea. However, distribution of these fungal diseases is geographically restricted.

Fungal pathogens have extreme genotypic and phenotypic diversity and adaptability to a wide range of environmental conditions. The high pathogenic diversity in the pathogen population poses difficulties in deploying stable, resistant varieties, as these succumb to newly evolving pathogenic races. Moreover, location specific breakdown of Host Plant Resistance (HPR) is continuously challenging the resistance breeding programs. Thus, understanding of the pathogens' genetic diversity is an important prerequisite in developing and deploying varieties with durable resistance to diseases.

Our research mainly focused on:

Diseases of Chickpea: Ascochyta blight caused by Ascochyta rabiei, Botrytis Gray Mold caused by Botrytis cinerea, Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium oxysporum
f. sp. ciceris and emerging new soil borne diseases such as root rots caused by Sclerotium rolfsii (Collar rot), Rhizoctonia bataticola (Dry root rot) and Fusarium solani (Black root rot).

Diseases of Pigeonpea : Fusarium wilt caused by Fusarium udum.

Our major activities are:

1. Identification of molecular markers to study the genetic diversity existing within and among the pathogenic as well as non-pathogenic isolates of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. c iceris , Ascochyta rabiei, Botrytis cinerea in chickpea and Fusarium udum in pigeonpea, collected from different geographical locations in India.
2. Development of cost-effective and user-friendly molecular diagnostic kit for detecting diversity in fungal pathogens of chickpea and pigeonpea.

Characterization of pathogens will help in developing area-specific multiple disease resistant varieties and their strategic deployment for the durability of resistance in the molecular breeding program.

For further information, contact: Suresh Pande (s.pande@cgiar.org)