Molecular And Genetic Analyses Of Seed And Flower Color Variation In Chickpea

Cultivated chickpea was domesticated ~8-10,000 years ago in the fertile crescent along with several other founder crops at the advent of agriculture. The cultigen spread several millenia ago to other regions of the world, notably to the Ethiopian highlands and the Indian subcontinent, regions that form centers of current day diversity in the cultigen. Substantial phenotypic variation is associated with this post-domestication diversification for a range of plant phenotypes.

We characterized morphological variants that alter seed and/or flower color at the genetically-defined B and C loci, and define the genetic architecture of the green-seeded form. Analysis of sequence variation in candidate genes from biological pathways suggested by the morphological phenotypes, coupled with mining of draft whole genome sequence data and expression filtering, was a facile approach to identifying the probable causal genes conditioning these traits. These results suggest a paradigm of a biology-driven approach to gene identification for other traits in chickpea, and more generally in other species.