Pearl Millet

Pearl millet is gaining importance as a climate-resilient and health-promoting nutritious crop. Recent evidences using microsatellites suggest the monophyletic origin of pearl millet and its further migration and secondary diversification leading to enormous diversity. Genetic erosion of landraces has been evident in different pearl millet growing regions due to replacement with modern cultivars. Large variability found in pearl millet germplasm has been conserved in several genebanks. Toward enhancing the utilization of pearl millet germplasm, available subsets like core and minicore collections and reference sets should be extensively evaluated to identify trait-specific germplasm and also develop genomic resources to associate sequence differences with trait variations.