Abstract
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is the second largest cultivated grain food legume globally. Terminal drought is one of the serious yield constraints that confer ca. 40% yield loss. A range of translational genomics approaches are being used to accelerate genetic gain in chickpea breeding and develop improved chickpea varieties for enhancing food and nutritional security in developing countries. In this direction, as a part of several initiatives and strategic collaborations with several partners from different countries, large-scale genomic resources including draft genome sequence, re-sequencing of> 500 chickpea lines, comprehensive transcriptome assembly, high density genetic and BIN maps, QTL maps as well as physical maps have been developed. For trait mapping, by using linkage mapping approach, a “QTL-hotspot” harboring QTLs for several drought tolerance related traits was identified on linkage group 04 …