PJB-2019-844
Mutagenesis with EMS is an alternative to recombinant breeding for inducing allelic diversity in cotton
Saba Zafar, M Atif Iqbal, Ammad Abbas and Mehboob-Ur-Rahman
Abstract
Present study was conducted to develop and characterize 131 G. hirsutum mutant lines along with the wild type (FH-Lalazar) for plant height (PH), ginning out turn (GOT) percentage, upper half mean length (UHML), fiber strength (FS) and micronaire value (MIC). A total of 107 mutant lines depicted significant variation for plant height. Maximum plant height (133.33 cm) was observed for the mutant line LZM-51-2. High GOT percentage was measured for two mutant lines (1.53%). A total of 76 mutant lines (58.02%) depicted higher fiber strength while 51 mutant lines showed lower variation (38.93%) than that of the wild type. One of the mutant lines exhibited 3.26 MIC values which was significantly lower than the wild type. All the mutant lines showed reduced UHML value than that of the wild type owing to the selection of mutant lines made for resistance to cotton leaf curl disease as well as high boll number which may have some negative impact on UHML. Secondly, fixation of genes has been achieved by the breeders for developing cotton varieties with high UHML which may limit the scope of mutagenesis for improving such highly domesticated trait. This phenomenon can be explored in length by re-sequencing the mutant lines. Correlations among the traits have been observed in the same manner as reported for cultivated diploid as well as tetraploid cotton species, suggesting that the mutant traits were conferred by the new alleles generated at the same locus, thus eliminating the chances of creating new genes. The principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to group the mutant lines which may have significant importance in selecting the best mutant lines for developing resilient cotton cultivars. These mutant lines can also be used as a genetic resource for unraveling the genetic circuits of various traits using high-tech genomic assays.
To Cite this article:
Zafar, S., M.A. Iqbal, A. Abbas and M.U. Rahman. 2022. Mutagenesis with EMS is an alternative to recombinant breeding for inducing allelic diversity in cotton. Pak. J. Bot., 54(4): DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.30848/PJB2022-4(38)
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