Research Projects

Onion is one the important vegetables crops cultivated globally for seed and bulb purpose. Onion is cultivated all over the world due to its extensive benefits especially commercial and medicinal purposes. Even though India is the second largest producer, the productivity is very low when compared to other major onion growing countries like Iran, Netherlands and Egypt, due to many biotic causes. Purple blotch of onion caused by the fungus Alternaria porri is considered as the one important diseases affecting onion and accounts for about 10- 90 percent yield reduction. Air borne conidia and inoculum present on the bulbs bulbs make this disease very aggressive. There are cumbersome reports are available on detection, diagnosis and management of A. porri using chemical fungicides and botanicals. But literatures on the biological management of purple blotch is rudimentary only. Only few biocontrol agents like Pseudomonas sp, Bacillus sp Actinobacteria and few Trichiderma sp are reported to hav atagonistic activity against onion purple blotch disease at global level. Exploitation of native microbiome of crops plants against pest and disease management is emerging nowadays due to their enhanced action against the target pathogens. Also next generation sequencing is employed to identify different microbial communities habituating in the endosphere. Exploitation of native microbiome, mechanism action of microbiome induced resistance against purple blotch is not yet explored so far. So, to overcome all these gaps the present proposal has been formulated with the hypothesis that (1)What are all the unexplored and under exploited mircobiome communities are habituating in the onion endosphere (2) Whether these underexploited microbiome can be exploited for the management purple blotch (3) How does these microbime communities modify the host genes and so on.