Breeding of Vegetable, Spice and Tuber Crops

Spice crop

• In pepper molecular markers are used for detecting sex of the plants at young stage or for phylogenetical studies.
  

• Molecular markers like RAPD, AFLP and ISSR polymorphism were used to characterize important cultivars, varieties and related species of black pepper to develop fingerprints and to study the inter relationship.
  

• Attempts are being made to isolate genes that could offer resistance to foot rot caused by Phytophthora capsici and clone coat protein genes for conferring resistance to viral diseases.
  

• Attempts are made to clone resistance genes from allied species of Piper, namely P.colubrinum and use of markers for developing mapping population. Significant variation in DNA amount was observed among 9 species of Piper.

• The DNA amount of a wild octoploid accession of P. nigrum was approximately double that of a cultivated tetraploid variety of the same species.

• In vanilla RAPD and AFLP profiles coupled with morphological characters can be utilized to assess the variability and hybrid nature of genotypes and of successful interspecific hybridization and production of hybrids.