Inheritance of flowering time in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) under cold stress conditions

Flowering is the primary characteristic of spermatophytes, which includes key crop plants like chickpea. The duration of flowering in plants with indeterminate growth is directly related to the yield. Early flowering in chickpea extends the reproductive phase, resulting in increased productivity. The experiment was carried out at the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding, CSK Himachal Pradesh Krishi Vishvavidyalaya, Palampur, during the rabi season. The current investigation involved the crossing of the ICC-16349 (donor and cold-tolerant parent) with the GPF-2 (recipient and cold-susceptible parent) to produce a total of 80 potential hybrids. Screening of parents was conducted using 51 Simple Sequence Repeat (SSR) markers, of which marker TA-180 showed polymorphism. An evaluation was performed under field conditions to investigate the genetics of time to flowering of F2 progeny plants resulting from the cross of chickpea genotypes GPF-2 (which flowers late under cold stress) and ICC-16349 (which flowers early under cold stress). In order to analyse the F2 data and to assess the goodness of fit, the chi-square test (χ2) was applied. During the experiment, TA-180 was used to screen 80 potential hybrids. The results showed that 34 of these hybrids (42.5 %) were confirmed to be actual hybrids. The F2 generation of plants exposed to cold stress exhibited a segregation pattern, with a ratio of 3:1 between late and early flowering plants. This indicates that the trait of late flowering is under monogenic control that suppresses the trait of early flowering. The current work has the potential to aid in the creation of effective breeding strategies for the production of chickpea cultivars that exhibit early flowering under cold conditions. This would result in improved yields for chickpea crops grown in winter in Northern India.