Proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) belongs to one of the first cultivated plants. Although the crop is traditionally grown, especially in Asia and from European countries through to Russia, nowadays it has become a new alternative crop and a new raw material for food production in many developed countries. Also changes of climatic conditions can support the growth of this drought-resistant pla...

Mycotoxins in food are of growing health importance due to their association with a number of human and animal diseases. In humans, mycotoxins have been associated with neural tube defects, oesophageal and liver cancer. Additionally, mycotoxins affect productivity and trade with in the affected communities. The incidence and extent of mycotoxins in sorghum and millet is not well established. Th...

Soluble and bound phenolic compounds were extracted from different varieties of millet types namely, finger millet, foxtail, and proso millet cultivated at dry and intermediate climatic zones in Sri Lanka. The extracts were examined for their total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC), and proanthocyanidin content (PC). The antioxidant activities were meassured by reducing powe...

Millets are extremely important in the African SAT (semi-arid tropics), produced in 18.50 million ha by 28 countries covering 30% of the continent. This is a significant 49% of the global millet area, with a production of 11.36 million tons by 1994. There are nine species which form major sources of energy and protein for about 130 million people in SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa). Among these, only f...

The objective of this research was to determine the conversion efficiency of proso millet to ethanol compared to corn in a bench-scale dry-grind procedure. Seven proso millet cultivars and six advanced breeding lines containing waxy starch were fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae and ethanol production was compared with normal corn and “highly fermentable” corn. The highly fermentable corn ...

Generating genomic resources in terms of molecular markers is imperative in molecular breeding for crop improvement. Though development and application of microsatellite markers in large-scale was reported in the model crop foxtail millet, no such large-scale study was conducted for intron-length polymorphic (ILP) markers. Considering this, we developed 5123 ILP markers, of which 4049 were phys...

Pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum) has potential as a grain crop for dryland crop production in the southeastern United States. Whether or not pearl millet will be compatible in rotation with cotton (Gossypium hirsutum), corn (Zea mays), and peanut (Arachis hypogaea) will depend, in part, on its host status for important plant-parasitic nematodes of these crops. The pearl millet hybrid 'TifGrain...

Virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) is a powerful technique to study gene function in plants. However, very few VIGS vectors are available for monocot plants. Here we report that Foxtail mosaic virus (FoMV) can be engineered as an effective VIGS system to induce efficient silencing of endogenous genes in monocot plants including barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), wheat (Triticum aestivum) and foxtail...

Although the origin and domestication process of foxtail millet (Setaria italica subsp. italica (L.) P. Beauv.) has been studied by several groups, the issue is still ambiguous. It is essential to resolve this issue by studying a large number of accessions with sufficient markers covering the entire genome. Genetic structures were analyzed by transposon display (TD) using 425 accessions of foxt...

Foxtail millet (Setariaitalica L.) is a tractable experimental model crop for studying functional genomics of millets and bioenergy grasses. But the limited availability of genomic resources, particularly expressed sequence-based genic markers is significantly impeding its genetic improvement. Considering this, we attempted to develop EST-derived-SSR (eSSR) markers and utilize them in germplasm...