Chickpea translational genomics in the ‘whole genome’ era

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) plays vital role in ensuring the nutritional food security in Asian and sub-Saharan African regions of the world. Conventional breeding effortstoelevate theyield levels andenhance crop productivity are constrained due to low level of genetic diversity present in the cultivated gene pools. Large scale genomic resources in chickpea have enabled the use of molecular breeding to develop superior chickpea varieties. In addition, efforts with an objective to exploit the available huge genetic diversity in genebank to address the issue of low productivity, ICRISAT has initiated large scale genome re-sequencing projects