Northeast India is rich in genetic diversity of horticultural crops and colocasia is one of the important crops. This region is rich in colocasia diversity for both cultivated and wild species particularly in jhum fields, homestead gardens, near water bodies, river banks, forests and road sides. Wide range of variability is observed in vegetative characters, corm and cormel characters, yield and quality characters. It is cultivated in jhum field as a mixed crop along with paddy and other crops like ginger, chilli, maize, turmeric etc. and in homestead garden, it is cultivated along with maize, cucurbits, chilli, King chilli, etc. The nutrient rich and gluten free tuber crop is an integral part of traditional cuisines of ethnic people of this region. All the plant parts of this ariod member are edible. Several traditional dishes have been prepared from leaves, petioles and tubers. The leaves, petioles and damaged tubers are also fed to pig and poultry. Recent past, the genetic diversity of colocasia is under threat due to urbanization, climate change, introduction of new crops, and pest and diseases and resulted in genetic erosion. The conservation of these vast gene pool is necessary.
Sweet orange (Citrus sinensis (L.) Osbeck) is an important commercial citrus fruit crop, cultivated in India and across the world. In India most of the cultivated sweet orange species were introduced varieties. In this study, we used two molecular markers, SSR and InDels, to understand the genetic diversity and population structure of seventy-two sweet orange genotypes. Genetic parameters consisted of a total number of alleles, a number of polymorphic alleles (effective alleles); genetic diversity (G.D.), expected heterozygosity (He), and the polymorphic information content (PIC) were calculated based on molecular data. Two dendrograms were constructed based on the InDels and SSR. In both the cases, they formed three major clusters showing various degrees of variations with respect to members of the clusters. Population structure analysis revealed the presence of two distinct subpopulations. Therefore, in order to address various challenges and develop sweet orange varieties with desirable traits, there is a need to broaden the genetic base of sweet orange through the intensive collection in the northeastern region. These results of intraspecific genetic variability of the collections will dictate the path for the sweet orange breeding and conservation programs in India.
Citrus is globally one of the major fruit crops, occupying a place of prominence in international trade and tariff through horticultural commodities. Despite such distinction, citrus crop is confronted with a variety of biotic and abiotic stresses, thereby, sustaining production is always a daunting task. The genome size of citrus is rather small, ranging from 265 to 400 MB, probably an advantage for controlled trait specific editing. The evolution of next generation sequencing has facilitated the whole genome sequencing of as many 10 citrus species with 16 draft genome sequences, offering near future possibility to develop genome tailored citrus species or inducing the desired genetic transformation to address the issues chronically ailing commercial citrus cultivation in India, which is by no mean, a simple task to accomplish. Despite genetically intrinsic challenges involved in generating transgenics in perennial crop like citrus, several transgenics have been developed in namely, sweet orange, lemon, and grapefruit loaded with some useful traits. But, the public perception and the time taken to develop trangenics in citrus and less success ratio led the researchers adapt alternate ways. Of late, the thumping success of genome editing tools, especially Clustered. Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR)-Cas9 system has provided a new molecular tailoring machine for citrus improvement. In several citrus species like sweet orange, pummelo, and grapefruit CRISPR-Cas9 system has resulted in value added multiple traits-based transgenics. However, the major drawback of the CRISPR/Cas9 system is the generation of significant off-target cleavage sites as a result of complexing of gRNA with mismatched complementary target DNA within the genome. The use of CRISPR as genome editing technology is anticipated to induce many desired traits in citrus in years to come with more commercial applications in field for changed canopy structure, root traits, regular bearing, extended fruit maturity, besides multiple disease resistance.
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