Prashant Kaushik

By Navjot Singh Brar, Dinesh Kumar Saini, Prashant Kaushik, Jyoti Chauhan and Navish Kumar Kamboj

Vegetables are essential for human health and well-being. For sustaining an excellent production of vegetable crops, the seed is a primary input. Moreover, good quality seed is an important requirement for the vegetable industry, and there is a huge demand that has been expanding, considering the fact that seed multiplication is economically pertinent for vegetable cultivars to contend commercially. But the healthy seed production is usually a sumptuous trait and tormented by agricultural tactics, genetics as well as by the environmental factors. Features like seed output of the vegetables, sizeable genetic variation, the prerequisite for advancement and acceptance of a good quality vegetable seed. Here different mechanisms for seed production in vegetable crops has been presented, also vital areas and factors influencing seed production, and eventually discourses regarding the opportunity of plant breeding to sustainably make improvements to vegetable seed production.

Part of the book: Agronomy

By Vinay Sharma, Dinesh Kumar Saini, Ashish Kumar, Hari Kesh and Prashant Kaushik

Rice (Oryza sativa L.) supplies nourishment to about half of the population of the world’s inhabitants. Of them, more than 2 billion people suffer from ‘hidden hunger’ in which they are unable to meet the recommended nutrients or micronutrients from their daily dietary intake. Biofortification refers to developing micronutrient-rich diet foods using traditional breeding methods and modern biotechnology, a promising approach to nutrition enrichment as part of an integrated strategy for food systems. To improve the profile of rice grain for the biofortification-related traits, understanding the genetics of important biofortification traits is required. Moreover, these attributes are quantitative in nature and are influenced by several genes and environmental variables. In the course of past decades, several endeavours such as finding the important quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for improving the nutrient profile of rice seeds were successfully undertaken. In this review, we have presented the information regarding the QTLs identified for the biofortification traits in the rice.

Part of the book: Agronomy

By Prashant Kaushik, Opinder Singh Sandhu, Navjot Singh Brar, Vivek Kumar, Gurdeep Singh Malhi, Hari Kesh and Ishan Saini

The better strategies to examine RNA or DNA from soil allow us to understand the microbial diversity and features in the soil, which are challenging to identify by typical culture techniques. In this direction, the literature on soil metagenomics and its usefulness is ever-increasing and so as its implementation experiences. Omics techniques are going to assist the metagenomics in achieving agricultural sustainability. In doing so, essential understanding on the reference soil would serve to help upcoming soil survey initiatives, lessening bias and raising objectivity. Although the interpretation of limited details has influenced microbial ecologists, the scope of methodological bias remains unfamiliar. A detailed catalog of functional genes and soil microorganisms does not yet exist for any soil. Overall, this chapter provides thoughts related to the soil metagenomics, its importance, and conventional methods of analysis, along with prospects and challenges of soil metagenomics.

Part of the book: Mycorrhizal Fungi

By Sandeep Kaur Dhaliwal, Pooja Salaria and Prashant Kaushik

Grain legumes are well known as staple sources of soluble protein worldwide. Pea is essentially the most quickly growing crop for immediate human consumption and has the potential for higher effect as being a protein supply for foods processing apps. Pea seeds are an essential source of plant-based proteins. The better acceptance of pea protein-rich food is due to pea manifold attributes, excellent functional qualities, high vitamin value, accessibility, and comparatively small cost. Pea proteins are not merely nutritional amino acids but are an indispensable source of bioactive peptides that offer health benefits. This chapter focuses on the present information of isolation methods, extraction, and of seed proteins in pea. Overall, we believe that analogous research and advancement on pea proteins would be required for further more substantial increase in pea protein utilization is envisaged.

Part of the book: Grain and Seed Proteins Functionality

By Prashant Kaushik

The efficiency of precision vegetable farming cannot deny in the current of climate change. As compared to west adoption of reliability precision agriculture approaches in developing world is a gradual procedure. The small scale of farms limits economic benefits from currently accessible precision farming technologies. Nevertheless, horticulture interventions like geographical positioning system (GPS), geographical information system (GIS), artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, sensor technologies, etc., are being utilized for precision vegetable farming to improve production and quality of vegetables. This retains excellent promise for developing vegetable crops within the present farming scenario when climate change makes the whole rethink agriculture practices. Overall, this chapter will provide useful information about precision vegetable farming technologies for vegetable growers, enthusiasts, farmers, and researchers.

Part of the book: Technology in Agriculture

By Navjot Singh Brar, Sat Pal Sharma and Prashant Kaushik

Several enhancements to the conventional potato breeding are possible though they have encouragement as well as limitations. I n this direction, the marker-assisted selection may be utilized to stack major genes as well as QTLs. Whereas the genetic transformation and genome editing methods accelerate the process of ricking of genes/transgenes. Moreover, these methodologies supplemented with the next-generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and pipelines further aid in reaching the potato ideotype. Here, we overviewed the critical topics that are related to potatoes, from general background, breeding behavior, breeding approaches employed to the potato improvement. Overall, this information complied might serve as background information that is important for potato breeders.

Part of the book: Solanum tuberosum

By Rubi Gupta and Prashant Kaushik

Garlic and onion are either cooked like a vegetable because of their green leaves or are also used as a condiment. Many scientific studies affirm the positives of both for their anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antimicrobial potential. Moreover, garlic and onion are regularly employed to treat cardiovascular illnesses, strokes, atherosclerosis, hypertension, hyperlipidemias, and thrombosis, and are also proved effective against Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and cancers. Here we have compiled a piece of information regarding the compounds present in garlic and onion along with their pharmacological properties. Although much more studies are required to refine the utilization and enhance garlic and medicine’s effectiveness. We hope this work will provide helpful information regarding their pharmacological aspects.

Part of the book: Herbs and Spices

By Anand Kumar and Prashant Kaushik

Radish is a member of the Cruciferae family. The important traits for radish breeding include high yield, early maturity, late bolting, pungency, cold-hardiness, drought resistance, heat tolerance and soil adaptability. For successful radish production, one needs to the understand nature and behaviour of the flower and very important to identify the S haplotypes of parental lines to produce F1 hybrids based on self-incompatibility to get rid of laborious hand emasculation in radish. Therefore, further breeding programmes depend on inter-specific and intra-specific hybridization, which is vital in genomic studies and crop improvement by introducing desirable agronomic characters. It is essential to acquire detailed genetic information on chromosomes and inheritance. Genomics is now at the core of radish breeding to study the underlying differences in genotypes. Moreover, researchers have produced transgenic radishes with various agronomic characteristics over the last decade.

Part of the book: Advances in Root Vegetables Research

By Navjot Singh Brar, Prakash Mahala, Kartik Sharma, Parmdeep Singh Dhanda, Alpa Yadav, Meenakshi Sharma and Prashant Kaushik

Cumin is a seed spice which finds its place in variety of global cuisines, especially in Indian context. India leads in the world in production of cumin with 70% of world’s production and consumes 90% of this produce. It is a high potential crop with great demand around the world due to changing food consumption behavior, and increasing demand for value-added products such as oil and powder. Cumin has a distinct flavor and aroma owing to presence of essential oils. Cumin has different biological and biomedical properties and finds use in various ayurvedic preparations in different forms. Cumin has been found in three types of colours: amber, white, and black. Among this amber is widely accepted and black also have unique flavor. Cumin is a crop of tropical and subtropical regions and suitable for cultivation on wide variety of soils. Cumin production can be easily done with very few hindrances such as frost injury, wilt and powdery mildew. There is a lot of scope and prospectus regarding its cultivation which can be exploited in other cumin suitable regions of the world through various agronomical innervations, crop improvement programs and biotechnological tools.

Part of the book: Ginger

By Anand Kumar and Prashant Kaushik

Micronutrients play an indispensable role in human and animal growth. In the world, many people are suffering from malnutrition and micronutrient deficiency mainly due to lack of zinc (Zn) and iron (Fe). Several crops are grown, such as wheat, rice, maize, and legumes, to address the challenges of micronutrient deficiency. Wheat landraces are evidently proven to be a rich source of genetic variability as against modern cultivated varieties due to thousands of years of their cultivation under low input farming systems. Landraces serve as a potential reservoir of desirable allelic forms of valuable traits but are low in traits like Zn and Fe. Wheat is a major cereal consumed worldwide and could be a good source to provide these micronutrients. Biofortification in wheat can be an effective way to solve the problem of malnutrition. Biofortification in wheat varieties may be enhanced by the application of molecular breeding approaches, such as genome editing, transgenic technology, and marker-assisted selection. These biofortified wheat varieties show better adaptation to environments. In this chapter, we included the recent advances in quantitative trait loci (QTLs) in biofortified wheat and the techniques used to develop biofortified wheat varieties.

Part of the book: Landraces