Research Projects

Fruit crops play a significant role in the livelihood of farmers in North Eastern hill regions making the hill agriculture vibrant and potentiating the farmers’ economic condition. Citrus is the third important horticultural crops in India after mango and banana. India is the fourth largest producer of orange in the world. Khasi mandarin constitutes about 43.6% of the total citrus production in India and occupies nearly 38.2% of the total citrus cultivation area (National Horticulture Board, 2010-11). The northeastern region of India falls within two biodiversity hotspots viz., the ‘Indo-Burma Region’ and eastern Himalayan biodiversity. The northeastern Himalayan region is one of the three major centers of mandarin orange in India. Approximately 1600 ha are under mandarin orange cultivation scattered over nine states namely Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, Sikkim and the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, where this high value crop contribute

Soil samples were collected from diseased and healthy citrus orchards located in Boko and Sonapur regions. Sonapur samples were collected from two different gardens designated Garden- 1 (G1), and Garden-2 (G2). Twelve samples were collected from these three sites. The pH of soil ranged from 5.13 - 6.25 falling with acidic. Whole genome shotgun sequencing of the diseased and healthy soil sample revealed the total read before filtering to be 45.2 MB in the diseased and 59.9 MB in the healthy sample. Total bases before filtering (GB) were 6.8 in diseased and 9.0 in healthy. A total read of 6.4 % in diseased and 6.01 % in healthy samples failed to pass the quality control (QC) pipeline. The GC (%) in the diseased sample is found to be 62.5 % and nearly the same GC (%) was observed in healthy i.e., 62.3 %. The remaining sequences contained predicted proteins with known functions that passed QC and had no rRNA genes or predicted proteins. This gene profile information is deemed appropriate for the investigation of microbial profiles between diseased and healthy soil samples. Sequence read quality check.