Molecular marker assisted testing of hybridity of F1 plants in lentil.

In lentil, making crosses between two diverse parents is tedious because of its small flower size and low seed setting. Therefore, it becomes difficult to identify that a crossed seed is actually F1 or selfed or admixed seed. Therefore, the aim of present study was to identify true F1 plants using RAPD and SSR markers so that a mapping population having undistorted segregation ratio could be developed for studying genetics and tagging of wilt resistance genes in lentil. For this purpose, a total of 24 F1 plants derived from two crosses viz. Precoz (susceptible) x PL 02 (resistant) and Sehore 74-3 (susceptible) x IPL 406 (resistant) was studied. Out of these, only five plants (20.8%) were identified as true F1 hybrid as they carried either both parental allele or male parental allele at specific marker locus, while remaining plants were either selfed or admixture type. Our results, thus, suggest the successful deployment of molecular markers in assisting the selection in lentil breeding programmes.