Lablab as a Potential Feedstock for Biofuels – Genetic Analysis

Lablab (Lablab purpurious or Dolichos purpurious, Fabaceae) is a vegetable, forage and ornamental crop in various parts of tropical world. Both pods and foliage are nutritionally rich. We evaluated biomass yields of 17 lablab lines in the field and observed excellent crop growth, productivity as well as adaptability to the Virginia’s climate during 2011. Our goal is to characterize potential of lablab as a biomass source and its’ potential as a biofuel feedstock.  To identify the crops diversity for biofuel feedstock at genetic level, the young leaf samples of each of the 17 lines were collected and used for nucleic acid extractions. There were 457 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) out of which 202 are core nucleotide sequences for lablab available in Gen Bank. We were unable to find homologies to the enzymes that are of interest to us i.e. cellulose synthase, sucrose synthase (SyS), glucose 6 phosphatase (G6P), glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH1) from lablab ESTs. Therefore, PCR primers were designed from 10 complete coding regions of mRNA/ cDNA sequences of selected enzymes derived from soybean, alfalfa and pea. There were 20 primers designed and used for long range PCR on DNA of all the samples. Simultaneously, RNA of the selected lines was used for sequencing to generate crop specific information for the respective enzymes. We send all the samples for analysis and subsequent bio-informatic assembly process. The diversity results from PCR / sequencing data obtained will be presented.