Research Projects

Climate change and its effects on the agricultural sector is no longer a growing concern but a very present problem already affecting crop yield worldwide. India, due to its geographical diversity, and climatic conditions, is especially vulnerable to the erratic climate change which affects the most remote pockets of its civilization. Ensuring food security for its masses is now a priority, not only to combat hunger, but also to strengthen an agrarian economy that depends largely on the most marginalized sections of the society. Therefore, the outlook has now shifted to utilize traditional farming practices and to re-introduce indigenous crops that are more suited to our environment. Millets have become a focus of these efforts due to their numerous advantages over rice and wheat. Millets have a better nutrient profile, being higher in fiber, minerals like iron and zinc, essential amino acids, and a much lower glycemic index, making them an attractive nutricereal. Although the effective strategies for the popularization of millets in India for the last decade have laid a strong foundation to drive research in the area, millets face a very large deficit in the form of genomic resources like high-quality whole genome assemblies, expression profiles, molecular markers, linkage maps, QTLs etc. This shortage is especially noticeable for the minor (low cultivation) millets like little millet. Given its marginal cultivation and consumption, research on little millet has been a fringe area, after being overshadowed by rice, wheat, and other major millets like pearl millet and finger millet. There are fewer germplasms documented for little millet at ICRISAT and NBPGR than for any other millet varieties. However, a boom in millet research has been beneficial for little millet and the genomic resources for this crop have increased in the past decade. The lack of resources for little millet makes any studies in this crop novel and exciting. However, this also becomes a challenge as there will be a need for an effective strategy to derive as much benefit from the program as possible. The first challenge that will be undertaken in this study will be to improve the de novo whole genome assembly through anchoring of scaffolds into chromosomes and annotation of the improved genome. Then, the improved assembly will be used as a reference for large-scale studies on analyses of the molecular markers that can be used for genome-wide association mapping studies to map agronomically important traits such as seed size. The genome will also be the anchor for developing a gene co-expression profile to identify hub genes regulating drought and salinity tolerance.