A comprehensive resource of drought- and salinity- responsive ESTs for gene discovery and marker development in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

BACKGROUND: Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), an important grain legume crop of the world is seriously challenged by terminal drought and salinity stresses. However, very limited number of molecular markers and candidate genes are available for undertaking molecular breeding in chickpea to tackle these stresses. This study reports generation and analysis of comprehensive resource of drought- and salinity-responsive expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and gene-based markers. RESULTS: A total of 20,162 (18,435 high quality) drought- and salinity- responsive ESTs were generated from ten different root tissue cDNA libraries of chickpea. Sequence editing, clustering and assembly analysis resulted in 6,404 unigenes (1,590 contigs and 4,814 singletons). Functional annotation of unigenes based on BLASTX analysis showed that 46.3% (2,965) had significant similarity ( or = 5 ESTs) were also identified. Recognition sites for restriction enzymes were identified for 7,884 SNPs in 240 contigs. Hierarchical clustering of 105 selected contigs provided clues about stress- responsive candidate genes and their expression profile showed predominance in specific stress-challenged libraries. CONCLUSION: Generated set of chickpea ESTs serves as a resource of high quality transcripts for gene discovery and development of functional markers associated with abiotic stress tolerance that will be helpful to facilitate chickpea breeding. Mapping of gene-based markers in chickpea will also add more anchoring points to align genomes of chickpea and other legume species.