Development and verification of wheat germplasm containing Pm21

Abstract

Powdery mildew, a devastating disease that affects wheat, is caused by a Blumeria graminis f. sp. tritici. Powdery mildew is the obstacle in the cultivation of high yielding cultivars especially for wet climatic regions throughout the world. Developing new cultivar with high disease resistance genes is a commercially feasible and environmentally safe approach to reduce yield loss. In order to develop a marker associated with Pm21 gene, a pair of primers (STPK-F and STPK-R) was designed according to the sequence of a serine/threonine kinase gene (accession: HQ864471.1) using Primer Premier 5.0 software. To screen and characterize Pm21 gene, we used 37 recombinant inbred lines (RIL) of 02P67//Aizao-781/Yangmai158 along with five susceptible cultivars. Initially, these RIL were screened at both seedling and adult plant stages with B. graminis f. sp. tritici for visible scoring of powdery mildew resistant lines. It was observed that only a particular (Pm21) gene governs the resistance to disease in all the 43 set of genotypes.