Cajanus

Abstract

Pigeonpea is an important crop in the semi-arid tropics. Although ample morphological diversity is exhibited by pigeonpea as a crop, the same is not true at the molecular level. The crop has a rich source of variability in the form of wild species, which have played a major role in the introduction of disease resistance, good agronomic traits such as high protein content, identification and diversification of cytoplasmic base of cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) system, to name a few. Wild relatives in the secondary gene pool have been utilised for the improvement of pigeonpea, which introduce useful traits such as CMS, cleistogamy, high protein and seed weight, Helicoverpa armigera and sterility mosaic disease resistance. Cajanus platycarpus, a wild relative in the tertiary gene pool, was successfully crossed using hormone-aided pollinations, thereby avoiding embryo abortion that results from in vitro techniques. Advance generation lines have shown variation for many traits including resistance to H. armigera, bruchid and Phytophthora blight. A new source of CMS was also identified in one of the lines. A community effort was undertaken to develop simple sequence repeat markers for pigeonpea, which had very little genomic resources until recently.