Although some of the parental lines share common ancestor(s) in their pedigrees, a unique parent in each of the five improved varieties should contribute ∼50% genetic variation from a unique landrace through this breeding method.
While little remains of the local Afghan stocks, private collections, such as the one initiated by Dr. Kihara, have preserved much of the original diversity, accounting for ~500 unique Afghan landraces [ 19].
Growing improved varieties and landrace populations interspersed in the same region (and resulting hybridization between these types) could offer landraces unique genetic diversity (Bellon and Risopoulos 2001; Bellon et al. 2006; van Heerwaarden et al. 2009b).
The task in hand is now to characterize the expression patterns and responses unique to each landrace and the genes or specific alleles involved in order to compare with other commercial maize germplasm and suggest possible breeding or transgenic strategies to improve drought tolerance.
Such variants, called landraces, possess unique traits encoded in their genes.
It also confirms the existence of very unique short-grain aromatic landraces, perhaps carrying signatures of independent origin of an additional aroma quantitative trait locus in the indica group, unlike introgression of specific alleles of the BADH2 gene from the japonica group as in Basmati.
This emphasises the unique and potentially valuable nature of the landraces in indica 2 and, taken together with the paragraph above implies that these cultivars are have a drought resistance that is linked to root growth.
From 42 differentially expressed genes, seven were common to the two tolerant landraces and 27 genes were unique to M21 (Table S2) including genes encoding to: calcium binding protein, CDPK, calmodulin, GTP binding protein and phosphoinositides.
Here we used SNP analysis to demonstrate the importance of Afghan wheat landraces and found tremendous genetic diversity and province-specific characteristics unique to this geographic region.
While other Afghan wheat collections do exist, the collection of landraces found in the Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Japan is thought to be unique in terms of the number of sites visited, the diversity of their environmental conditions, and the overall number of landraces collected [ 4].
