ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Breeding
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1609917
Rapid recovery of homozygous Pr gene introgression lines in Indian tropical cauliflower backgrounds through combined use of morphological and molecular markers
Provisionally accepted- 1Division of Vegetable Science, Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), New Delhi, India
- 2Indian Agricultural Research Institute Regional Station, Katrain, Himachal Pradesh, India
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The study aimed at rapid anthocyanin biofortification of tropical cauliflower by combining morphological and marker-assisted selections. Two tropical varieties Pusa Ashwini (PA) and Pusa Kartiki (PK) were crossed with the donor KTPCF-1 (or PPCF-1) of snowball group. The F2, BC1F1, and F2:3 populations from PA/PPCF-1 and PK/PPCF-1 supported a single dominant gene (Pr) for purple colour in both seedling apical and curd portion. The F2 and BC1F2 plants were first selected for purple curd and morphological traits specific to tropical cauliflower namely semi-erect leaf habit, October-November maturity and tropical flowering habit. 40 and 30 purple curding plants were selected in F2 and BC1F2, respectively. Visual detection of homozygous and heterozygous purple plants was unreliable. Thus, these 70 plants were screened using two codominant (BoMYB2m and BoMYB4m) and one dominant (BoMYB3m) markers for forward selection. Total 19 plants in F2 and 21 plants in BC1F2 were found homozygous for the Pr gene, of which 13 F2 plants and all 21 BC1F2 plants produced sufficient seeds to advance F2:3 and BC1F2:¬3, respectively. The progenies showed a significant increase in total anthocyanin content. The MAS-derived PrPr progenies namely, PC2304-21, PC2304-93, PC2304-64, PC6704-16 and PC6704-36 were most promising with higher curd yield (>17.2 t/ha) hence, advanced to F3:4. These tropical type progenies are of immediate breeding use for anthocyanin-rich varieties/hybrids to harness the associated benefits in tropics.
Keywords: Anthocyanin, Brassica oleracea var. botrytis L., developmental transitions, Gene introgression, marker assisted selection
Received: 11 Apr 2025; Accepted: 26 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Singh, Kumar and Verma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shrawan Singh, Division of Vegetable Science, Indian Agricultural Research Institute (ICAR), New Delhi, 110 012, India
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