1. Improving drought tolerance in chickpea
for Africa and Asia
Pooran Gaur
Project Delivery Coordinator
ICRISAT, Patancheru, India
on behalf of Chickpea Group
GCP Challenge Initiative

2. Target countries for chickpea CI
India
Ethiopia
Kenya
Tanzania

3. Various projects linked to chickpea CI
G6007.04/G6010.04: Tropical Legumes I (TL I) - Objective 4: Chickpea
Phase 1&2 (2007- 2014)
PI and Lead Institute: Rajeev Varshney, ICRISAT
G4008.12: Linking genetic diversity with phenotype for drought tolerance
in reference collection (2008 - 2011)
PI and Lead Institute: L Krishnamurthy, ICRISAT
G7009.02: Mapping and validation of QTL for drought tolerance traits
(2009 -2011)
PI and Lead Institute: Pooran Gaur, ICRISAT
G7009.06: Development of a SNP platform (Nov 2009-Oct 2011)
PI and Lead Institute: Doug Cook, UC-Davis
TL-I complementary project in India - funded by The Dept. of
Biotechnology, Govt. of India (2011-14)
PI and Lead Institute: Rajeev Varshney, ICRISAT

4. Major Activities
1. Development of genetic and genomic
resources
2. Identification and validation of markers
associated with QTL for drought tolerance
traits
3. Marker-assisted introgression of drought
tolerance traits in farmer-preferred cultivars
4. Marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS)
for cumulating favorable alleles for drought
tolerance

5. • 1655 novel SSR markers
developed and validated. With
these the total number of SSR
markers available for chickpea
is over 2500
• GoldenGate assay for 768 SNPs
developed
• 2486 KASPar SNPs were
designed. 1484 SNPs were
found polymorphic in a set of
94 genotypes.
Development of molecular
markers for chickpea
Homozygote
Heterozygote
Homozygote
NTC

6. Development of high density linkage map
chickpea
1291 loci were mapped on to eight linkage groups
The total map distance ~845.5 cM
Average inter marker distance 0.6 cM/marker

7. Development of MAGIC lines
No. of crosses
28 2-way
14 4-way
7 8-way
>1000 F2 plants from 8-way crosses are currently being grown in a greenhouse
(A) ICC 4958 (B) ICCV 10 (C) JAKI 9218 (D) JG 11
(E) JG 130 (F) JG 16 (G) ICCV 97105 (H) ICCV 00108
8 Parents used in development of MAGIC lines

8. GA24
STMS11
TAA170
N121
GA24
TAA170
N142
Identified and validation of drought QTL
ICC 283 × ICC 8261
ICC 4958 × ICC 1882
QTL for
Root traits
Harvest Index
Yield related traits
Δ13C

9. Cross: Cultivars x Donors for root traits
(Confirm hybrids)
BC1: Cultivar x F1
↓
BC1F1
(Foreground and background selection)
BC 2: Cultivar x BC1F1
↓
BC2F1
(Foreground and background selection)
BC3: Cultivar x BC2F1
↓
BC3F1
(Foreground and background selection)
↓
BC3F2
(Selected homozygous plants for QTL-linked markers)
↓
2010/11 BC3F3
Seed multiplication and preliminary evaluation
↓
2011/12 Multilocation evaluation of BC3F4 lines
MABC for improving drought tolerance
Donors
Cultivars
JG 11
Chefe KAK 2

10. Evaluation of MABC lines
for root traits
Vertical bars denote standard error of differences. The means were significantly different at 0.001 level and were
based on 8 replicated cylinders with 2 plants in each cylinder)
Donor line Elite line
Donor line Elite line
MABC lines
MABC lines

11. MABC being run by NARS in TL-I Phase II
Egerton University - Kenya
ICCV 95423 × ICC 4958
ICCV 97105 × ICC 4958
DZARC - Ethiopia
Ejere × ICC 4958
Areti × ICC 4958
IIPR-Kanpur
DCP 92-3 ×ICC 4958
IARI-New Delhi
Pusa 362×ICC 4958

12. MARS for improving drought tolerance
2 Crosses
2008/09 Genotyping of F3 plants
2009/10 F4 (Seed mutiplication)
2010/11 Multilocation evaluation
(Ethiopia, Kenya, India) of F5
progenies and QTL analysis
2011/12 Selection and inter-crossing
of selected lines
•
Two good-by-good crosses involving cultivars from
Africa and Asia
28 new crosses available for initiating MARS

13.  Workshop on “Modern Breeding Technologies for Chickpea
Improvement” held during Oct 25 – Nov 19, 2010
 16 scientists participated
12 from five countries of
Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya,
Tanzania, Malawi,Algeria)
and 4 from four
countries of Asia (India,
Nepal, Bangladesh,
Myanmar)
 Included lectures, demo, field/lab visits, comprehensive data analysis,
interaction with different subject matter specialists at ICRISAT
Capacity building:
Modern breeding workshop

14.  Kenya:
- Ms Serah Songok, PhD student, Egerton University
- Ms Alice Koskie, PhD student, WACCI
- Mr Moses Oyier, MSc student, Egerton University
 Ethiopia:
- Mr Musa Jarso, PhD student, Addis Ababa University
- Mr Kebede Teshome, PhD student, Haramaya Uni.
- Mr Getachew Tilahun, Addis Ababa University
Capacity Building:
Degree students

15. Field trial and data management
• 11 datasets compiled and curated
• Trait ontology made available
• Pedigree information of ICRISAT’s chickpea breeding
program moved to ICIS
• Plan to use IB Fieldbook from coming crop season
• Handheld evaluated and keen to use Galaxy tab 10.1

16. Linkages with TL-II
• Key partners are common
• Joint capacity building on
integrated breeding of
chickpea
• Products from TL-I already
being integrated in TL-II
activities

17. The Chickpea CoP was established at the TL-I annual
meeting in Madrid during May 2011.
CoP Coordinator: Pooran Gaur, ICRISAT
CoP Mentor: Teresa Milan, Universidad de Cordoba, Spain
Aim: to promote knowledge sharing and mutual learning
on integrated chickpea breeding
Community of Practice (CoP) for
integrated breeding of chickpea

18. Partners in Chickpea CI
• ICRISAT- Patancheru, India (Pooran Gaur, Rajeev Varshney, L
Krisnamurthy, Vincent Vadez, Hari Upadhyaya, Trushar Shah, C
Sivakumar, M Thudi)
- Nairobi, Kenya (NVPR Ganga Rao)
• Egerton University, Kenya: (Paul Kimurto)
• EIAR, Ethiopia (Asnake Fikre)
• LZARDI, Tanzania (Robert Kileo)
• UAS-Bangalore, India (KP Vishwanatha, MS Sheshashaye)
• ANGRAU-Hyderabad, India (Veera Jayalakshmi)
• IIPR-Kanpur, India (SK Chaturvedi, Aditya Garg)
• IARI-New Delhi (Shailesh Tripathi, Ch Bharadwaj, J Kumar)
• RSKVV-Gwalior, India (M Yasin)
• RAU-Bikaner, India (SJ Singh)
• UC−Davis, USA (Doug Cook)
• University of Frankfurt, Germany (Peter Winter, Guenter Kahl)
• JIRCAS, Japan (Satoshi Tobita, Osamu Ito)
• DArT P/L (Andrzej Killian)