Phenotyping tobacco recombinant inbred lines for solanesol

Abstract

Solanesol is a pharmaceutically important phytochemical found in tobacco. In order to hasten the process of tobacco cultivar development for solanesol production, isolation and mapping of major genes responsible for production of solanesol, an immortal mapping population was developed. The study was undertaken to phenotype the Recombinant Inbred lines (RIL) population for solanesol for understanding the genetics nature of solanesol and identifying high solanesol recombinants. A total number of 260 RILs developed from the cross between HDBRG, a high solanesol line and By-53, a low solanesol line along with parents were phenotyped for solanesol content for five years (2012-17) and statistically analysed. The solanesol varied from 4.90% to 0.05% in different years. While, average solanesol varied in different years from 1.01% (2012-13) to 2.41% (2014-15) with an average of 1.73% for five years. The mean solanesol content in the RILs found to be between 0.91% and 2.88% during 2012-17 with 2.15% HDBRG and 1.34% By-53. Various statistical parameters estimated indicated that solanesol content is normally distributed among the population with trangressive segregation which shows that it is polygenic and controlled by many genes with minor and influenced by environment. A total of 21 genotypes with higher solanesol content than HDBRG parent were identified.