ABSTRACT
Barnyard millet is an important up surging minor millet in Asia countries for food and nutritional security. Being a minorcrop, the genetics and inheritance of the traits need to understand, for effective utilization in the crop improvementprogrammes. Here, we investigated the genetic background and inheritance of different traits in barnyard millet genotypes.Forty germplasm accessions were evaluated in different ecological environments of southern India for 17 quantitative traits.Genetic variability analysis using GENSTAT and the pooled REML mean data results revealed that Phenotypic Co-efficientof Variation (PCV) was greater than the Genotypic Co-efficient of Variation (GCV) over the diverged ecological locationsindicating the existence of environmental influence on all the biometric traits studied. In the Western Ghats region (E1),high heritability coupled with high genetic advance was exhibited for traits like days to flowering, plant height, days tomaturity, number of nodes, length of nodes, number of basal tillers, stem diameter, flag leaf length, flag leaf width,inflorescence length, inflorescence width, length of peduncle, number of racemes, single ear head weight and grain yield perplant. Traits like thousand grain weight expressed moderate genetic advance with high heritability while, length of lowerracemes expressed moderate heritability with high genetic advance. Similarly, high heritability coupled with high geneticadvance was recorded for all the characters in valley region (E2) except thousand grain weight that showed high heritabilitybut moderate genetic advance. In contrast, in the area of plains (E3), all the traits exhibited high heritability coupled withhigh genetic advance. Since, majority of the traits have shown high heritability with high genetic advance, selection mightbe effective in these traits irrespective of the environment.
ABSTRACT
Background: Diabetes mellitus is associated with structural changes in corneal endothelial cells and their thickness. The present study was done to compare the endothelial cell density (ECD), central corneal thickness (CCT) and morphology in diabetic and non-diabetic patients.Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted at Minto Ophthalmic hospital, BMC and RI Bangalore for a period of 20 months (October 2013 - May 2015). A total of 200 study subjects, 100 diabetics and 100 non-diabetic age matched controls were selected, and complete timed ophthalmic evaluation was performed. Specular microscopy was performed on all patients for endothelial cell count assessment and corneal thickness was measured by Pachymeter. The data was analyzed and represented using descriptive statistics. ‘t’ test was used for comparing the two groups.Results: The mean endothelial cell density in diabetic group was significantly lower (2438.73±250.23cells/mm2) compared to non-diabetic group (2599.88±168.16cells/mm2) (p<0.0001). The mean Central corneal thickness in diabetic group was significantly higher (518.40±28.13 μm) compared to control group (490.14±24.31 μm) (p<0.001). The Co-efficient of variation percentage of the diabetics was higher than the non-diabetics but this difference was not statistically significant (P>0.05). The hexagonality percentage was significantly lower in diabetic group compared to the controls suggesting less pleomorphism in the diabetic group.Conclusions: The study concludes that the endothelial cell density was lower and central corneal thickness was higher in diabetic patients compared with the non-diabetics. The altered endothelial morphology was significantly seen in the form of pleomorphism (hexagonality) but polymegathism was not significantly altered.