A Genomic Analysis of Historic Chickpea Landraces

The collection of seeds and living plants at the N.I. Vavilov All Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR) contains historic chickpea landraces sampled from major historic centers of chickpea cultivation and secondary diversification. In this work, we analyze the results obtained from phenotype characterization of 407 historic chickpea landraces grown in the trial fields of Kuban experimental station in 2017. GWAS analysis identified three single nucleotide polymorphisms on chromosomes 2, 7 and 8 that were highly associated with the days to flowering phenotype trait. These single nucleotide polymorphisms and the regions of genome near to these single nucleotide polymorphisms were identified in previous studies. Estimation of the Genotype–Environment interaction for phenotypic traits coincident with plant seeds led to identification of the best genotypes in the environments. These genotypes have an alternative homozygote at loci Ca7:30930779 which shows similar phenotypic traits that were described during phenotype characterization of seeds grown in the trial fields of the Kuban experimental station in 2016 and with the period of flowering typical of phenotype characterization of the plants in 2017. These results can accelerate the search for the seed samples that are the most promising for cultivation of chickpea landraces.