Genetic enhancement of Jatropha

Jatropha curcas has received great attention in recent years due to its potential as a bio-diesel crop especially in some developing countries including India. To make the Jatropha initiative economically sustainable and attractive to farmers, yield potential of the planting material needs be increased significantly through selection and genetic improvement. This final aim of this activity is to generate important genetic information on marker-trait linkage along with well-characterized novel genotypes of Jatropha. The investigators recognize the fact that most of the economically desirable traits for Jatropha are available within its genepool. However, these are dispersed in several genetic backgrounds in the genepool and, therefore, need to be pyramided in a step-wise manner. This activity is aimed to develop an efficient protocol for generation of dihaploids though pollen/ anther culture and to use it to generate novel dihaploid lines from F1 hybrids. The dihaploid plants thus generated will be phenotypically evaluated and used for linkage analysis and hybrid development.