Background: Genetic diversity is an essential resource for breeders to improve new cultivars with desirable characteristics. Recently, genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS), a next-generation sequencing (NGS) technology that can simplify complex genomes, has now be used as a high-throughput and cost-effective molecular tool for routine breeding and screening in many crop species, including the species...

Septoria tritici blotch (STB) is a devastating fungal disease affecting durum and bread wheat cultivation worldwide. The identification, development, and employment of resistant wheat genetic material is the key to overcoming costs and limitations of fungicide treatments. The search for resistance sources in untapped genetic material may speed up the deployment of STB genetic resistance in the ...

A large number of short grain aromatic rice suited to the agro-climatic conditions and local preferences are grown in niche areas of different parts of India and their diversity is evolved over centuries as a result of selection by traditional farmers. Systematic characterization of these specialty rices has not been attempted. An effort was made to characterize 126 aromatic short grain rice la...

high molecular weight (hmw) glutenin sub-units and baking quality related traits were studied in 49 iranian wheat landraces. the protein content ranged from 11.2% to 13.55%, and sds sedimentation volume varied between 40 and 60 milliliters. high molecular weight glutenin electrophoresis profiles revealed that at the glu-a1 locus, the frequency of null allele was higher than sub-units 1 and 2*. ...

Parasitism by Striga hermonthica (Del) Benth is a severe constraint in maizeproduction in sub-Saharan Africa. Varying levels of tolerance to Striga attack havebeen identified and exploited in breeding programs of several crops. However, thelevel and stability of the tolerance is generally unacceptable in field-practice. Onlylimited exploration has been undertaken among the farmers’ landraces to...

The modern cultivated potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) was fi rst recorded in Europe in the Canary Islands in 1567, but its origin has long been in dispute. Two competing hypotheses have proposed an “Andean” area (somewhere from the Andean uplands from Venezuela to northern Argentina) or a lowland south-central “Chilean” area, but the Andean origin hypothesis is today generally accepted. The ident...

the evaluation of gene bank germplasm collection for morpho-physiological traits is important in the breeding programs. although phenotypic variation was considered, it is likely that this phenotypic variation is largely genetic and therefore directly useable for breeders, especially for those traits with high heritability such as heading and maturity time, plant height, kernel number and weigh...