Exploitation of genetic and genomic resources for improvement of niger (Guizotia abyssinica L.F. Cass.) through breeding and biotechnological tools.
Niger (Guizotia abyssinica (L.f.) Cass.), belonging to the family Compositae (Asteraceae), subtribe Coreopsidinae, is a diploid (2n = 2x = 30) annual oilseed crop. The crop has its origin in Ethiopia and is cultivated in Asian Countries like India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, and parts of China. In addition to the seed oil, various parts of the plant have several ethnomedicinal uses and are valued for their nutritional properties. The crop is quite hardy, grows on marginal lands and hilly tops and slopes, and is less vulnerable to biotic and abiotic stresses as compared to other major annual oilseed crops. Varietal and hybrid development and trait improvement programmes are constrained by the strong self-incompatibility and lack of genomic resources. Since conventional sequencing of highly heterozygous genomes can lead to fragmented assemblies, redundant contigs (representing allelic variation), and difficulty in anchoring scaffolds to chromosomes, we have developed a homozygous doubled haploid (DH) line of niger (cv. JNS-9) to make the chromosome-level genome assembly more accurate and contiguous.