Vegetos

Abstract

Salinity is one of the greatest limiting factors in agriculture. Therefore, the ability of plants to adapt saline conditions is crucial to sus-tain worldwide crop production. Present study is meant to identify gene specific markers for salt tolerance in Chickpea. Selected chickpea geno-types were already characterized for salt tolerance and susceptibility. Sixteen gene specif-ic primers were designed from already identified abiotic stress resistant genes from database among which five were used for semi-quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction. The expression levels of two of them allow discrimination between toler-ant and susceptible genotypes. In tolerant genotypes (JG-62 and Pusa 1053) the expression level of these genes was higher as compared to susceptible genotypes (BG-256 and ICCV2). For primer 13 the relative fold increase in gene expression was 10 times as compared to 2 times in susceptible plants. For primer 6 the relative fold increase in gene expression was 5 folds in Pusa 1053 (tolerant) as compared to 4 folds in other geno-types. Gene expression was observed to be maxi-mum at 200mM concentration in almost all gen-otypes for above two gene specific primers. So, primer 13 is a potent gene for gene pyramiding in susceptible varieties for salt stress.