About Project

       Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the third most consumed legume crop around the world. Chickpea is a self-pollinated, diploid (2n=2x=16) and annual plant with a moderate genome size of about 740 Mbp. The generation of large-scale expressed sequence tags (ESTs) is a very useful and quick means of gene discovery and accelerates the research on non-model species. Although ESTs and other cDNA sequences are among the most reliable evidences for the identification of gene-rich regions in a genome, gene identification and genome annotation, very less effort has been made for chickpea in this direction as compared to other crop plants. This is reflected by a very small number of ESTs present in the dbEST database at NCBI (December 2009) for chickpea. The next generation sequencing technologies provide a cost-effective rapid means of sequencing the transcriptome of an organism. Our project is aimed at deep sequencing of transcriptomes of few important genotypes using next generation sequencing technologies followed by de novo assembly and annotation. The project involves analysis of various features of the chickpea transcriptome, including GC content, repeat content, putative functions, gene families, transcription factor encoding genes and its comparative analysis with other legumes. Further, the project aims at discovery and validation of genic functional molecular marker (microsatellites and single nucleotide polymorphisms) to provide a resource for molecular bredding. In addition, Comprehensive gene expression analysis will reveal the key genes involved in various developmental processes, which will provide a starting point for functional genomics studies in chickpea and other legumes.