Germination and early seedling growth are important for establishment of maize because maize is chilling sensitive crop and low temperature during early period of growth can be detrimental to subsequent crop growth and productivity. Therefore, it is important to protect maize seedling from cold stress. A study was conducted on induced cold tolerance by 24-epibrassinoslide (EBR) at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India. Maize seedlings were raised in green house condition (25/18°C day-night temperatures). Ten days old seedlings were treated with EBR (0.0, 0.01, 0.1, 1.0 and 10 μM) and then divided into two sets, one set was kept in greenhouse (25/18°C day-night temperatures) and another was transferred to net house (cold stress). Data on various morpho-physiological traits was recorded after 7, 14 and 21 days of treatment. Exogenous application of 1.0 μM EBR had significant effect on growth and morpho-physiological traits under both conditions. The maize seedlings treated with EBR were more tolerant to cold stress than the untreated one. Significant increase in plant height, dry matter accumulation, chlorophyll content, total soluble proteins and starch contents was observed under both conditions, however, the results were more pronounced under cold stress. 1.0 μM concentration being the most effective under both conditions. Maintenance of high tissue water content, reduced membrane injury index, increased total chlorophyll, soluble sugar and protein content were taken as the possible indicators of EBR induced chilling tolerance.

Abstract:Medicinal plants are the main natural pools for the primary health care system, ethno-medicine, as well as traditional Indian system of several medicines. Uttarakhand also known as 'Herbal State', is a rich source of medicinal plants and traditional medicinal knowledge. A great deal of information about medicinal plants of Uttarakhand is scattered in different forms. Although many medicinal plant databases are available, currently there is no cohesive manually curated database of medicinal plants widely distributed in Uttarakhand state. A comprehensive database has been developed, known as the Uttarakhand Medicinal Plants Database (UMPDB). UMPDB provides extensive information on botanical name, common name, taxonomy, genomic taxonomy id, habit, habitat, location in Uttarakhand, part use, medicinal use, genomic information (including number of nucleotides, proteins, ESTs), chemical information, and scientific literature. Annotated medicinal plants integrated in the current version of the database were collected from the existing books, databases, and available literature. The current version of UMPDB contains the 1127 records of medicinal plants which belong to 153 plant families distributed across 13 districts of Uttarakhand. The primary goal of developing this database is to provide traditional, genomic, and chemical descriptions of the medicinal plants exclusively found in various regions of Uttarakhand. We anticipate that embedded information in the database would help users to readily obtain desired information.

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A large proportion of the Asian population fulfills their energy requirements from wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Wheat quality and yield are critically affected by the terminal heat stress across the globe. It affects approximately 40% of the wheat-cultivating regions of the world. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop improved terminal heat-tolerant wheat varieties. Marker-assisted breeding with genic simple sequence repeats (SSR) markers have been used for developing terminal heat-tolerant wheat varieties; however, only few studies involved the use of microRNA (miRNA)-based SSR markers (miRNA-SSRs) in wheat, which were found as key players in various abiotic stresses. In the present study, we identified 104 heat-stress-responsive miRNAs reported in various crops. Out of these, 70 miRNA-SSR markers have been validated on a set of 20 terminal heat-tolerant and heat-susceptible wheat genotypes. Among these, only 19 miRNA-SSR markers were found to be polymorphic, which were further used to study the genetic diversity and population structure. The polymorphic miRNA-SSRs amplified 61 SSR loci with an average of 2.9 alleles per locus. The polymorphic information content (PIC) value of polymorphic miRNA-SSRs ranged from 0.10 to 0.87 with a mean value of 0.48. The dendrogram constructed using unweighted neighbor-joining method and population structure analysis clustered these 20 wheat genotypes into 3 clusters. The target genes of these miRNAs are involved either directly or indirectly in providing tolerance to heat stress. Furthermore, two polymorphic markers miR159c and miR165b were declared as very promising diagnostic markers, since these markers showed specific alleles and discriminated terminal heat-tolerant genotypes from the susceptible genotypes. Thus, these identified miRNA-SSR markers will prove useful in the characterization of wheat germplasm through the study of genetic diversity and population structural analysis and in wheat molecular breeding programs aimed at terminal heat tolerance of wheat varieties.

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