Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) is an important grain legume of the Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia and East Africa. More than eighty five percent of the world pigeonpea is produced and consumed in India where it is a key crop for food and nutritional security of the people. Here we present the first draft of the genome sequence of a popular pigeonpea variety ‘Asha’. The genome was assembled using long sequence reads of 454 GS-FLX sequencing chemistry with mean read lengths of >550 bp and >10-fold genome coverage, resulting in 510,809,477 bp of high quality sequence. Total 47,004 protein coding genes and 12,511 transposable elements related genes were predicted. We identified 1,213 disease resistance/defense response genes and 152 abiotic stress tolerance genes in the pigeonpea genome that make it a hardy crop. In comparison to soybean, pigeonpea has relatively fewer number of genes for lipid biosynthesis and larger number of genes for cellulose synthesis. The sequence contigs were arranged in to 59,681 scaffolds, which were anchored to eleven chromosomes of pigeonpea with 347 genic-SNP markers of an intra-species reference genetic map. Eleven pigeonpea chromosomes showed low but significant synteny with the twenty chromosomes of soybean. The genome sequence was used to identify large number of hypervariable ‘Arhar’ simple sequence repeat (HASSR) markers, 437 of which were experimentally validated for PCR amplification and high rate of polymorphism among pigeonpea varieties. These markers will be useful for fingerprinting and diversity analysis of pigeonpea germplasm and molecular breeding applications. This is the first plant genome sequence completed entirely through a network of Indian institutions led by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and provides a valuable resource for the pigeonpea variety improvement.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13562-011-0088-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Protease inhibitors in legumes are one of the most promising weapons that confer resistance against insects by inhibiting proteases present in the gut of insect larvae. In the present study, trypsin inhibitor activity was detected in the seed flour extracts of 10 selected varieties of chickpea. The presence of inhibitor was confirmed by dot blot analysis. All the varieties showed inhibitory activity in vitro against the gut protease of Helicoverpa armigera (HGP). Trypsin inhibitor has been purified to near homogeneity to 60.46 fold and 29.20% recovery from chickpea seeds using heat denaturation, ammonium sulphate fractionation, DEAE-Sephadex A-25 and Sephadex G-75. The purified inhibitor showed a single band on SDS-PAGE corresponding to molecular mass of 30,000 Da. The purified inhibitor was active over a wide pH range whereas it retained maximum activity between pH 6 and 10. The inhibitor protein was stable up to 80°C but retained only 40% of activity when heated at 100°C for 20 min. The inhibitor lost its complete activity at 121°C. The chickpea trypsin inhibitor exhibited inhibitory activity against Helicoverpa armigera both in vitro and in vivo. In insect bioassay, a progressive decline in larval weight, growth and survival as well as temporal extension of larval growth was observed after feeding H. armigera larvae on diet supplemented with increasing concentrations of chickpea trypsin inhibitor. The adult emergence was also adversely affected by the inhibitor. It may be concluded that chickpea trypsin inhibitor has insecticidal potential against H. armigera.

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