Major step forward in chickpea and pigeonpea research – reference genome data assembled

Breeding high nutritional varieties of chickpea and pigeonpea just got easier. With new technology, genomic processes that could have taken years, have been completed in just a few months. This has been possible by work of scientists from the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) headquartered in India, in collaboration with NRGene, Israel who have helped create multiple assembly lines of pigeonpea and chickpea genomes.  This means scientists can not only better understand crop traits, they can also significantly speed up work on improved varieties.

With this technology from NRGene, ICRISAT has chickpea and pigeonpea genomes to a reference level quality, that researchers can use. This would help maximize favorable nutritional properties of these high-protein legumes.

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