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Lead Centre: ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI),(Division of Plant Pathology), New Delhi
Background and Rationale
The Herbarium CryptogamaeIndiaeOrientalis (HCIO), a National herbarium established in 1905, not only serves as an educational resource for the National Agricultural Research System (NARS), but also conserves fungal biodiversity. At present, HCIO is enriched with about 50,000 specimens with Type Specimens (3800), New species recorded (570), New Indian Genera recorded (19), Indian Exsiccati sets (18) and Foreign Exsiccati sets (188). The Indian Type Culture Collection (ITCC), a National repository of fungal cultures (about 4000), was established in 1936 consists of Ascomycetes (1005), Basidiomycetes (495), Mastigomycetes (25), Zygomycetes (390), Hyphomycetes (1565), Coelomycetes (362), which includes plant pathogens, biocontrol agents, fungi for medical and industrial use including mushroom and yeast. There is a need to conserve the fungal biodiversity available with HCIO and ITCC by documenting through digitization and DNA barcoding respectively.

Virtual Herbarium can become an online resource through digitization. It provides dynamic access to the wealth of fungal specimen data. Many herbaria viz. Australia’s virtual herbarium, National Herbarium Netherland, New Zealand virtual herbarium and United State virtual herbarium are providing on-line access to data originating from their collections. Digitization of herbarium specimens with HCIO will help a wide range of stakeholders, including Students and researchers.

DNA barcoding is aimed at developing a ‘biological barcode’ to enable identification of any organism at the species level. DNA barcoding has been promoted as a potentially powerful method for the efficient, accurate and high throughput assignment of unknown specimens to known species. Reference barcodes must be derived from expertly identified vouchers deposited in biological collections. Interspecific variation should exceed intraspecific variation (the barcode gap), and barcoding is optimal when a sequence is constant and unique to one species (Hebert et al. 2003). Ideally, the barcode locus would be the same for all kingdoms. The cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1; Universal barcode for animals) is more reliable in a few clades of closely related fungal species (Robideau et al. 2011) but not all. Due to presence of large database and universal primers, ITS is proposed as the standard barcode (Schoch et al. 2012). This proposal will be applicable for many fungal genera but not for fungi which are having species complexes (eg. Fusarium, Colletotrichumand Cercospora). For the fungi having low ITS interspecific variability, secondary markers must be used to accurately report genetic diversity. Therefore, DNA barcode will be developed for important genera available at ITCC (Table 1) after identifying suitable DNA barcode regions.

Objectives
  1. To identify a suitable barcode regions and develop DNA barcode for the cultures available at ITCC.
  2. To digitize fungal specimens available at HCIO.
Targets/ Activities
  1. Enrich of HCIO and ITCC with collection, isolation and purification of pathogenic fungal specimens/cultures.
  2. Identification of suitable DNA barcode regions.
  3. Analysis of DNA barcode sequences.
  4. Submission of the barcode data in public database (NABG, BOLD, NCBI) as well as one reference database (ITCC barcoding).
  5. Digitization of HCIO and ITCC collections.

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Indian Council of Agricultural Research, Ministry of Agriculture (Govt. of India), Pusa Campus, New Delhi-110012, INDIA