UC Davis

Chickpeas (Cicer arietinum) act as an important source of nutrition in many developing countries. In recent years, the productivity of the chickpea crop has been negatively impacted by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceri. To address this problem, efforts have been made to find resistance genes present in chickpea germplasm to combat this disease. This project is focused on improving genomic resources in chickpea with the goal of identifying a resistance gene that was predicted previously in a quantitative trait locus (QTL) study. Three cultivated accessions were sequenced and analyzed for structural and genetic differences and an assay was designed for fine mapping the QTL region conferring disease resistance. The sequencing resulted in improvement of the reference genome and expansion of chickpea genomic resources. The assay design will be applied in further research in an attempt to identify the causal gene for Fusarium wilt resistance which can be applied to breeding efforts to deploy more resistant cultivars.