Investment

Chickpea suffers from a range of biotic and abiotic stresses that can cause significant production losses. The losses caused by many of these stresses can be avoided through the breeding of resistant or tolerant varieties, but appropriate genes are not always available within the cultivated germplasm, requiring extensive searching for such genes in global germplasm collections. The CGIAR research institute ICARDA, has one of the largest germplasm collections of chickpea and offers for mining such genes for incorporation into Australian cultivars. This project aims to search the large chickpea germplasm collection held by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) to find suitable sources of needed traits. It will employ a Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) using Geographical Information System (GIS) to improve the probability and frequency of predicting useful chickpea accessions. These subsets of chickpea accessions will be investigated for new resistant genes to pyramid them into Australian cultivars through conventional and molecular approaches.