Chickpea is the most important food legume and ranks third in terms of total global production . The susceptibility of chickpea to dehydration severely reduces the yield and its productivity has remained historically low.Plant cell wall or extracellular matrix (ECM) is the first compartment that senses the stress signals, transmits them to the cell interior, and eventually influences the cell fate decision. It is now well established that plants being sessile have evolved many adaptations to counteract dehydration.

These adaptations are classified into four categories:
Dehydration avoidance (developmental and physiological traits),
Dehydration tolerance (physiological and biochemical adaptations),
Dehydration escape and dehydration recovery.

A few characteristics such as osmotic adjustment (OA) and cell membrane stability are recognized as effective components of dehydration tolerance in many crops. These are expressed in terms of relative water content (RWC) of the plant, accumulation of compatible solutes like proline, and increased permeability of ions and electrolytes. Further, the status of photosynthetic machinery has been considered as an ideal index to monitor the health and vitality of plants during dehydration

A total of 134 differentially expressed ECM proteins were identified during the course of dehydration using classical two dimensionalelectrophoresis (2-DE) coupled with LC-MS/MS. The comparison of dehydration responsive ECM proteome in chickpea reveals predicted and unexpected components indicating their possible role in dehydration tolerance. Pathways involved in cell defense, signaling, and cell wall modification under dehydration stress in chickpea Extra Cellular Matrix. These are the metabolites:ascorbate peroxidase, nucleotide diphosphate kinase, malate dehydrogenase, leucine aminopeptidase, Glutamate synthase, glyoxylase 1 , epoxide hydrolase, reversibly glycosylated peptides,xylogluganendotransglycosylase,cellulosesynthase,sedoheptulose , glycosyl transferase, tubby like protein, ferritin, thioredoxin, methyl tranferase, aldolase, glycine rich proteins, mannose lectin, wall associated kinase, chitinase receptor kinase 1.

1)Niranjan Chakraborty et al 2007 studied the differentially expressed proteins in chickpea extracellular matrix during dehydration stress.They studied Seeds of eight commercial chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) cultivars (Vijay, WR-315, Annigiri, CPS-1, K-850, JG-62, C-235, and ICCV-2) The status of photosynthetic pigments viz., chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, and carotenoid was determined in all the varieties under dehydration. The better maintenance of the photosynthetic apparatus was observed in C-235 and JG-62, which also showed the highest protein content under dehydration, while maximum damage was observed in Annigiri and ICCV2. All the varieties showed an initial decline in photosynthetic pigments, while a general increase in pigments was observed around 72 h. It was noted that during this period, there was an increase in Relative Water Content presumably as a result of increased proline accumulation. It is likely that maintenance of higher RWC in JG-62 because of Osmotic Adjustment at lowered Water Potential could maintain growth and metabolic activities including photosynthesis and other physiological processes. After 96 h, constant decline in RWC and proline accumulation displayed the severity of dehydration, where OA might fail to maintain the turgor in affected tissues. These results, all together, suggested JG-62 as a potential dehydration tolerant variety as compared to the remaining varieties studied. In this study of the 163 DRPs, 25 proteins were clearly up regulated and 38 proteins were down regulated, while 100 proteins showed a mixed pattern of time dependent expression. MS/MS analysis was carried out for 134 DRPs resulting in 98 proteins with a significant match, while rest showed no significant match in the database.
The number of dehydration responsive chickpea ECM proteins which expressed, are listed in the Proteomics


2)Gupta S et al 2009 Wilt of chickpea caused by Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceris is one of the most severe diseases of chickpea throughout the world. cDNA amplified fragment length polymorphism followed by homology search helped in differentiating and analyzing the up- and downregulated gene fragments. Several detected DNA fragments appeared to have relevance with pathogen-mediated defense. Some of the important transcript-derived fragments were homologous to genes for sucrose synthase, isoflavonoid biosynthesis, drought stress response, serine threonine kinases, cystatins, arginase, and so on. Reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction performed with samples collected at 48 and 96 h postinfection confirmed a similar type of differential expression pattern. Based on these results, interacting pathways of cellular processes were generated. This study has an implication toward functional identification of genes involved in wilt resistance.


3)Shukla RK et al 2009,reported that ectopic expression of CAP2, a single AP2 domain containing transcription activator from chickpea (Cicer arietinum) in tobacco improves growth and development, and tolerance to dehydration and salt stress, of the transgenic plants.


4)Hui Peng et al 2009 repoted an actin gene that was isolated from chickpea for the first time and designated as CarACT1 (for Cicer arietinum L. actin gene 1; Genbank accession no. EU529707). It encoded a putative protein with 377 amino acids and contained five exons and four introns within genomic DNA sequence. CarACT1 was localized in cyto- plasm and showed high similarity to other well known actins from various species.


4)H.R. Kavousi et al 2009,stated that fungal disease, ascochyta blight, caused by Ascochyta rabiei is a major yield limiting factor of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) around the world.Transcript accumulation of four genes encoding phenylalanine ammonia-lyase (PAL), chalcon synthase (CHS), isoflavone reductase (IFR) and Flavanone 3-Hydroxylase (F3H) induced in response to race 3 of A. rabiei was compared in resistant and susceptible genotypes. Results obtained in this study showed that in resistant genotype all 4 phenylpropanoid pathway genes: PAL, CHS, IFR and F3H were rapidly up regulated 6 h after inoculation with race 3 of A. rabiei. However, transcripts of PAL and IFR genes were rapidly accumulated in both resistant and susceptible cultivars. Therefore, induction of key enzymes of phenylpropanoid pathway appeared to be an important defense mechanism of chickpea plants against A. rabiei.