The major staple food crops production is not able to fulfill food requirement of the global population due to relatively higher population growth rate in developing countries. The research on these crops for exploring their ultimate yield potential is currently at a plateau level. To replace the existing pressure on these major crops there is an urgent need to explore other alternative crops having the potential to replace and fulfill the available food demand. FAO statistics reveal that there is a high frequency of low birth weight children in the developing countries, which is primarily due to deficiency of micronutrients in the mother's diet. Amaranth, an underutilized crop and a cheap source of proteins, minerals, vitamin A and C, seems to be a future crop which can substantiate this demand due to its tremendous yield potential and nutritional qualities, also recently gained worldwide attention. Recently, current interest in amaranth also resides in the fact that it has a great amount of genetic diversity, phenotypic plasticity, and is extremely adaptable to adverse growing conditions, resists heat and drought, has no major disease problem, and is among the easiest of plants to grow in agriculturally marginal lands. The present review is an effort to gather the available knowledge on various diversified fields of sciences for the future exploitation of the crop.

-The commercial importance of linseed (Linum usitatissimumL

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-The objective of this work was to evaluate the relationship among phenotypic and quality traits in a set of indigenous and exotic accessions of linseed (Linum usitatissimum). The experimental material consisted of 151 accessions of linseed belonging to landraces and cultivars collected from diverse agroecological zones. Five randomly chosen plants of each accession in each replicate were tagged, and data were recorded for the 12 following agronomic traits: days to flowering, days to maturity, plant weight, plant height, tillers per plant, secondary branches per plant, capsules per plant, seeds per capsule, 1,000 seed weight, harvest index, seed yield per plant, and oil content. Capsules per plant, harvest index, and plant weight played a direct and indirect major role on seed yield. High heritability, coupled with high genetic advance for plant weight, secondary branches per plant, capsules per plant, and seed yield per plant, suggests that selection based on these traits can be effective. Regarding per se performance, the following accessions can be exploited for commercial cultivation: Shweta (5.41 g), Gaurav (5.07 g), and EX-3-3 (4.77 g) for seed yield; and Shubhra (45.09%), Mukta (44.94%), Laxmi-27 (45.06%), and Shweta (44.25%) for oil content. The chemical profiling of fatty acids obtained in the present study can provide a platform for the selection of accessions for the genetic improvement of linseed.Index terms: Linum usitatissimum, correlation, fatty acids, genetic advance, heritability, path analysis. Relações entre características fenotípicas e de qualidade em acessos de linhaça nativos e exóticosResumo -O objetivo deste trabalho foi avaliar a relação entre as características fenotípicas e de qualidade de um conjunto de acessos nativos e exóticos de linhaça (Linum usitatissimum). O material avaliado consistiu de 151 acessos de linhaça nativos ou de cultivares obtidas de diferentes zonas agroecológicas. Cinco plantas de cada acesso, selecionadas aletoriamente, foram identificadas, e foram registrados dados para as 12 seguintes características agronômicas: número de dias para o início do florescimento, número de dias para a maturação, peso da planta, altura da planta, número de perfilhos por planta, número de ramos secundários por planta, número de cápsulas por planta, número de sementes por cápsula, peso de mil grãos, índice de colheita, produção de sementes por planta e conteúdo de óleo. O número de cápsulas por planta, o índice de colheita e o peso da planta desempenharam papel importante tanto direta quanto indiretamente na produção de sementes. Altos valores de herdabilidade, associados a alto avanço genético para peso da planta, número de ramos secundários por planta, número de cápsulas por planta e produção de sementes por planta, sugerem que a seleção com base nestas características pode ser eficaz. Em relação ao desempenho per se, os seguintes acessos podem ser explorados em cultivo comercial: Shweta (5,41 g), Gaurav (5,07 g) e EX-3-3 (4,77 g) para produção de sementes; e Shubhra (45,...

Abstract:Papaver somniferum is a chief source of diverse physiologically active alkaloids, required by the pharmaceutical industry. The present study describes the diversity of the alkaloid spectrum of 122 opium poppy accessions of Indian origin by means of a cluster analysis based on Mahalanobis generalised distances. The accessions could be grouped into 11 clusters according to their relationship between the contents of morphine, codeine, thebaine, narcotine and papaverine in raw opium. The diversity of the alkaloid spectrum of 11 clusters reflected the very low correlations between the contents of the individual alkaloids across the 122 entries, found earlier. The clusters represented almost all possible combinations of the high content of an alkaloid with high or low content of another alkaloid. Although on average the morphine content exceeds the sum of the other four alkaloids, in one cluster the narcotine content (15.3%) was even higher than that of morphine (14.6%) and the content of the remaining alkaloids was also extremely high. The variation range among the clusters was for papaverine between 0.14% to 5.3%, while for morphine between 12.4% to 18.0%. The results indicate a large space for the breeding of opium poppy for individual alkaloids or particular combinations of alkaloids, as required by pharmaceutical industries. Keywords: alkaloids; clustering; multivariate; Papaver somniferumOpium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.) is the main source of raw opium, which contains valuable alkaloids utilised by pharmaceutical industries, i.e. mainly morphine, codeine, thebaine, narcotine and papaverine. India is one of the largest producers of opium which meets national and international demands. Global trends show the growing utilisation of opium alkaloids and derivatives. The world demand for morphine, the main alkaloid of opium, and for codeine was 420 t and 350 t, respectively, in 2008. The domestic and international demand for thebaine-based drugs increased from 140 t in 2008 to 160 t in 2009. Thebaine is used to manufacture semi-synthetic morphine analogues i.e. oxycodone, oxymorphine, buprenorphine etc. The increasing demand for opium alkaloids can be met by the development of high opium yielding varieties able to produce the specific alkaloids. Successful breeding, however, requires sufficient genetic diversity to start from. Several studies have been done to determine the genetic diversity in opium poppy based on morphological traits (Lal et al. 1996;Bhandari et al. 1997; Saini & Kaicker 1997;Singh et al. 1998Singh et al. , 2003Singh et al. , 2004Tiwari et al. 2001), but few attempts have been made to classify the diverse germplasm lines on the basis of alkaloids. Shukla et al. (2006) investigated the alkaloid profile of 98 accessions of opium poppy and found large variability among the accessions in all five alkaloids. Yadav et al. (2006) investigated the genetic parameters and correlations Czech

In India, among nonedible oilseed crops, linseed is a commercial crop having tremendous economic and industrial importance. The seed production is low due to limited resources, so the development of high-yielding lines with desirable characters is urgently needed. In the present study seven parents' half diallel data was subjected to biplot analysis to identify the heterotic crosses, genetically similar parents, and to study their interrelationship. Parent Sln-Ys with A-79 and A-03 with A-79 for capsules per plant and seed yield, parent Mukta with Sln-Ys and Mukta with BAU-45 for seeds per capsule, and parents Mukta, A-103, A-79 and A-94 for test weight had lowest correlation. Parent B [Mukta] and F [A-79] were good general combiner for all the traits. The crosses F [A-79]  ×  A [Sln-Ys] and D [A-03]  ×  F [A-79] for capsules per plant, test weight and seed yield per plant, cross D [A-03]  ×  A [Sln-Ys] for capsules per plant and test weight and cross D [A-03]  ×  F [A-79] for test weight and seed yield per plant were heterotic. None of the crosses were heterotic for seeds per capsule.

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