Journal of Food Processing & Technology

Abstract

Agro-morphological Study on Induced Mutants and Mutant Hybrids in Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.)

Kumar S and Ramesh B

Cereals and legumes represent the two most important groups of food crops, so that an improvement in these two groups of crops has been the major concern of plant breeders over the years. In the past, these crops have been improved through several conventional approaches of plant breeding. Mutations provides an opportunity to create hitherto unknown alleles, so that the plant breeder does not remain handicapped due to limited allelic variation at one or more gene loci of interest. A number of mutants have been induced by several workers in lentil by using various physical and chemical mutagens. Present work was undertaken to study the agro-morphological study on induced mutants and mutant hybrids in lentil. Results suggested that of the eight induced mutants studied here, two mutants namely bold seeded and early maturing ones are of economic importance and can be used for direct commercial cultivation, while the rest may be utilized in cross breeding programs.