Urdbean, scientifically known as Vigna mungo L. Hepper, is a short-duration pulse grown widely during the kharif, or monsoon, season in India. It is prized for its protein-rich seeds, which are a dietary staple in the form of dal, and for its ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen through symbiotic bacteria in its root nodules. That nitrogen-fixing capacity makes urdbean an excellent rotational crop, helping to restore soil fertility in systems dominated by rice and wheat. Yet the crop has long been constrained by its vulnerability to diseases, particularly Yellow Mosaic Virus, a devastating viral infection transmitted by whiteflies that can cause severe yield losses across the pulse-growing belt.

The new variety emerged from an intraspecific cross between two established breeding lines, Pant U 19 and KUG 502. Breeders used the pedigree method, a classical selection technique in which progeny from the cross are advanced through successive generations while individual plant performance and family lines are carefully tracked. This approach allows breeders to fix desirable traits such as disease resistance, maturity duration, and yield potential into a genetically stable, uniform variety. After years of selection and multiplication, Mash 878 entered the formal testing system of the All India Coordinated Programme on MULLaRP crops, the national network that evaluates mungbean, urdbean, lentil, lathyrus, rajmash, and pea across diverse agroclimatic locations.

The evaluation process was rigorous. Mash 878 was tested in the Initial Varietal Trial during the kharif season of 2020 and subsequently in Advance Varietal Trials from 2020 through 2022, competing directly against the best existing check varieties in the zone. The results were striking. Across the trials, the new variety recorded an average yield of 14.62 quintals per hectare, a figure that outperformed four standard checks by margins ranging from roughly 13 percent to nearly 45 percent. Compared with KUG 479, which yielded 12.94 quintals per hectare, Mash 878 delivered a 12.98 percent advantage. Against Pant U 31 at 12.66 quintals per hectare, the gain was 15.48 percent. The margins widened dramatically against older checks: IPU 94-1 yielded 11.11 quintals per hectare, making Mash 878 31.59 percent superior, while KPU 405, at 10.11 quintals per hectare, trailed by 44.61 percent.

Performance of this magnitude matters in a country where pulses remain in chronic deficit. India is the world’s largest producer and consumer of pulses, yet domestic production has historically struggled to keep pace with demand, forcing imports and driving price volatility. Improving the productivity of urdbean in the kharif season, when the crop competes for land with monsoon-planted cereals, is a key strategy for closing that gap. A variety that reliably yields 30 to 45 percent more than older checks gives farmers a compelling economic reason to allocate more of their monsoon acreage to pulses, which in turn supports the broader policy goal of crop diversification away from water-intensive rice in the northwestern plains, where groundwater depletion has become a serious concern.

Beyond raw yield, the agronomic profile of Mash 878 has been tailored to the realities of the zone. The plants average about 69.3 centimeters in height and display a semi-erect growth habit, a architecture that supports good pod bearing while remaining manageable under mechanized and manual harvesting alike. The variety is morphologically distinguishable by its ovate-lanceolate green leaves and a light green stem marked with purple splashes, characteristics that help seed inspectors and farmers verify genetic purity in the field. Flowering occurs at approximately 42 days after sowing, and the plants reach maturity at around 78 days, a duration well suited to the monsoon window in the North West Plain Zone and compatible with timely sowing of the following wheat crop. Each plant bears an average of 33 pods, a component trait that underpins the variety’s high yield expression.

Disease behavior is arguably the most important dimension of the new release. Mash 878 is resistant to Yellow Mosaic Virus, the single most destructive disease of urdbean and mungbean in South Asia, and tolerant to three additional threats: web blight, anthracnose, and bacterial leaf spot. Web blight and anthracnose, both fungal diseases favored by the warm, humid conditions of the monsoon season, can defoliate plants and blemish pods, while bacterial leaf spot further erodes photosynthetic capacity. A variety combining resistance to the viral scourge with tolerance of these fungal and bacterial pathogens reduces the need for chemical intervention, lowers production risk, and stabilizes yields in years when disease pressure is high. For smallholder farmers who often lack access to effective pesticides or the resources to apply them, genetic resistance is the most economical form of plant protection available.

Grain quality, often the deciding factor in varietal adoption, also stands out. Mash 878 produces medium-bold, blackish seeds with good culinary properties. The 100-seed weight is 3.6 grams, with a 100-grain volume of 3.0 milliliters and a density of 1.20 grams per milliliter, physical parameters that indicate plump, well-filled seeds commanding favorable market prices. Cooking time for dal preparation is 28 minutes, a reasonable duration that affects household fuel consumption and consumer acceptance. Nutritionally, the seeds contain 23.01 percent protein and 2.8 percent total minerals, reinforcing the role of urdbean as an affordable source of dietary protein and micronutrients in a country where vegetarian diets dominate and protein deficiency remains a public health challenge.

The path from experimental line to farmers’ fields followed the formal machinery of Indian varietal release. The Varietal Identification Committee identified Mash 878 for release at the Annual Group Meeting of Kharif Pulses, held virtually from May 11 to 13, 2023, at the Indian Institute of Pulses Research in Kanpur. The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare subsequently released and notified the variety through Notification number S.O. 1560(E), dated March 26, 2024, clearing it for commercial cultivation. The notified zone spans parts of Western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, the plains of Uttarakhand, Punjab, Haryana, and part of Jammu and Kashmir, an expansive territory covering some of India’s most intensively farmed land.

The development was a joint effort between the Pulses Section of the Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics and the Regional Research Station in Gurdaspur, both part of Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. The research team, led by Ashok Kumar and including R. K. Gill, Shayla Bindra, Parul Sharma, Inderjit Singh, and Sarvjeet Singh, was involved in the testing and release of the variety. As certified seed of Mash 878 multiplies and reaches the market, breeders expect the variety to expand the area under kharif urdbean in the zone and adjoining regions, diversifying rotations, enriching soils, and adding a profitable, protein-rich legume to the monsoon landscape. In the quiet arithmetic of plant breeding, a few extra quintals per hectare and a few fewer disease outbreaks translate into more resilient livelihoods for thousands of farming households, and Mash 878 appears poised to deliver exactly that.

Subject of Research: Development and release of the high-yielding, disease-resistant kharif urdbean variety Mash 878 for the North West Plain Zone of India

Article Title: Mash 878: A New Variety of Kharif Urdbean for North West Plain Zone (NWPZ)

Article References: Kumar, A., Gill, R. K., Bindra, S., Sharma, P., Singh, I., & Singh, S. (2026). Mash 878: A New Variety of Kharif Urdbean for North West Plain Zone (NWPZ). Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding, 86(1), 103-103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44489-026-00006-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44489-026-00006-3

Keywords: urdbean, black gram, Vigna mungo, plant breeding, Mash 878, Punjab Agricultural University, Yellow Mosaic Virus, kharif pulses, crop diversification, varietal release, North West Plain Zone, yield improvement

The research, led by Amar Jeet Gupta and colleagues at the ICAR-Directorate of Onion and Garlic Research in Pune, was conducted under the All India Network Research Project on Onion and Garlic with financial support from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. Field trials followed a randomized complete block design, with the team recording data on yield attributes, maturity and disease response at every site. The scale of the effort matters: multi-environment trials of this kind are the gold standard for separating genuine genetic merit from the noise of local growing conditions, and they are essential before any variety can be recommended for commercial release.

The first major finding came from a combined analysis of variance, which revealed statistically significant effects of genotype, environment and, crucially, the genotype-by-environment interaction, or GEI, for marketable yield at the P < 0.05 level. In plain terms, the best onion in one location was not necessarily the best in another, and the differences were too large to ignore. This interaction is the central headache of plant breeding: a breeder can select a high-yielding line at a single trial site, only to watch it underperform when farmers plant it hundreds of kilometres away under different conditions.

To dissect this interaction, the team turned to the Additive Main Effects and Multiplicative Interaction model, better known as AMMI, a statistical framework that combines the additive analysis of variance with principal component analysis of the interaction term. The results were strikingly clean. For red onions, the first interaction principal component, IPCA1, explained 91.3 percent of the total GEI, while IPCA2 accounted for just 6.1 percent. For white onions the pattern was even more extreme, with IPCA1 capturing 96.8 percent and IPCA2 only 1.9 percent. Such a dominant single interaction axis means that most of the genotype-by-environment drama in these onions plays out along one dimension, which greatly simplifies both interpretation and selection decisions.

Using AMMI biplots, the graphical tools that plot genotypes and environments in the space of the interaction components, the researchers identified a clear set of stable performers. Among the red genotypes, RO-1769, RO-1773, RO-1783, Bhima Kiran and NHRDF Red-2 showed minimal interaction effects, meaning their yields stayed close to expected levels across all five locations. On the white side, W-444, W-500 and W-045 earned the same distinction. Stability in this context is not simply about being average; the ideal genotype combines high mean yield with low sensitivity to environmental shifts, and these eight lines passed both tests.

Because no single statistic can capture every nuance of stability, the team cross-checked their AMMI results with a battery of complementary parametric measures. These included Lin and Binns’s superiority index, which quantifies how far a genotype’s yield deviates from the maximum at each site; Wricke’s ecovalence, which measures a genotype’s contribution to the overall interaction; Shukla’s variance, an estimate of stability variance independent of environmental effects; the regression coefficient from the classic Finlay-Wilkinson tradition; and the AMMI Stability Value, which condenses the interaction principal component scores into a single number. The strong concordance among these indices and the AMMI-based rankings gave the researchers confidence that their conclusions were robust rather than artefacts of one particular model.

Spearman’s rank correlation analysis then delivered a practical bonus for breeders: the superiority index emerged as the most discriminative index for selecting high-yielding, stable genotypes. This matters because stability analysis can be computationally demanding and statistically intimidating, and knowing that a simple, well-established index tracks closely with the more elaborate AMMI framework offers a cost-effective screening tool for breeding programmes with limited resources. It also guards against the risk of relying on a single metric that might reward mediocrity, since the superiority index explicitly penalizes genotypes that fall short of the best performer at any location.

The implications extend well beyond statistical elegance. India is one of the world’s largest onion producers, and the crop’s productivity is strongly influenced by environmental variability, a vulnerability that climate change is expected to sharpen. Varieties that hold their yield across diverse environments are the backbone of a resilient food system, and the genotypes flagged in this study, including established checks like Bhima Kiran and NHRDF Red-2 alongside experimental breeding lines, are now candidates for large-scale evaluation and potential varietal release. The authors frame the work as a foundation for breeding climate-resilient onion cultivars adapted to India’s diverse production environments, a goal that aligns with broader efforts to stabilize vegetable supply chains against erratic weather.

The study also demonstrates the value of integrating AMMI with classical parametric stability models rather than treating them as rivals. AMMI excels at visualizing and partitioning the interaction structure, while measures such as ecovalence and Shukla’s variance provide genotype-specific summaries that are easy to rank and communicate. When independent methods converge on the same shortlist of genotypes, breeders gain the kind of decision confidence that single analyses rarely provide. Similar integrated approaches have proven effective in wheat, barley, lentil and soybean stability studies, and this work brings that methodological maturity to one of India’s most economically and culturally significant vegetables.

For farmers, the practical message is that help is on the way in the form of onions bred not just for peak yield in a favourable season but for dependable performance in whatever the weather delivers. For consumers, whose kitchens and household budgets depend on a steady onion supply, the research represents a quieter but no less important form of food security science. The next step will be multi-season validation and the formal testing pipeline that precedes varietal release, but the statistical groundwork laid by this team has already narrowed the field from 43 contenders to a handful of proven, stable performers ready to move toward India’s onion fields.

Subject of Research: Genotype-by-environment interaction and yield stability analysis of onion genotypes across multiple Indian locations

Article Title: Performance of Onion (Allium cepa L.) Genotypes at Multi-Location for Stability Analysis

Article References: Gupta, A. J., Mahajan, V., Aribenchi, K. V., Benke, A. P., Gawande, S. J., Dutta, R., Karuppaiah, V., Gedam, P. A., & Khade, Y. P. (2026). Performance of Onion (Allium cepa L.) Genotypes at Multi-Location for Stability Analysis. Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding, 86(1), 65-78. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44489-026-00009-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44489-026-00009-0

Keywords: onion, Allium cepa, genotype-by-environment interaction, AMMI analysis, yield stability, plant breeding, multi-environment trials, stability statistics, climate-resilient cultivars, India, crop science, varietal release

The significance of the achievement lies in the genetic distance the breeders had to bridge. Teosinte, specifically the subspecies parviglumis, is the wild grass from which maize was domesticated roughly nine thousand years ago in the Balsas River valley of Mexico. Although the two subspecies are close enough to be cross-fertile, millennia of domestication and selection have left modern maize and its ancestor with profoundly different plant architectures, flowering behaviors, and growth habits. Teosinte is a highly branched, tillering plant with small, hard-cased seeds arranged in two-ranked spikes, while cultivated maize is a single-stalked giant bearing rows of naked kernels on a massive ear. Reconciling these divergent genomes in a hybrid that performs well in farmers’ fields is a formidable breeding challenge.

The formal recognition of DFH-2 came through India’s rigorous varietal release system. The Central Sub-Committee on Crop Standards, Notification and Release of Varieties of Agricultural Crops, operating under the Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Family Welfare of the Government of India, issued notification number S.O. 4388(E) dated 8 October 2024. That notification authorizes cultivation of the hybrid in two major agro-climatic regions: the Northern Western Zone, comprising the plains of Uttarakhand along with Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, and the Central Zone, covering Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. This geographic scope spans some of the most intensive dairy and livestock production areas in the country, where demand for high-quality green fodder consistently outstrips supply.

DFH-2 is designed specifically as a forage crop rather than a grain hybrid, and this distinction shapes its entire value proposition. Forage maize is harvested as whole green plants and fed to cattle and buffalo, either fresh or as silage, making total biomass rather than grain yield the economic target. According to the varietal notification published by Shivam Yadav and N. K. Singh of the Department of Genetics and Plant Breeding at Pantnagar, the hybrid delivers high green forage yield and high dry matter yield, and it holds clear advantages over the national check varieties used in Indian testing programs, namely COHM-8, J-1006 and African Tall. Those checks represent the benchmark forage materials against which every new candidate must prove itself across multiple locations and seasons.

What sets DFH-2 apart from conventional forage hybrids, however, is a suite of plant-type traits inherited from its wild parentage. The hybrid produces multiple basal and lateral tillers, an architectural feature that is rare in elite maize germplasm but characteristic of teosinte. Tillering allows a single plant to send up several productive stems from its base, effectively increasing the number of harvestable stalks per unit area without increasing seeding rate. In addition, the hybrid possesses regrowth potential, meaning that after a cut the stand can recover and produce further biomass. Taken together, these traits open the possibility of multi-cut management, in which farmers harvest the crop more than once in a season rather than taking a single terminal harvest.

The authors of the notification emphasize that this combination of changed plant type, tillering, regrowth capacity and elevated forage yield may prove especially useful for dairy farmers. India’s dairy sector depends on a reliable, year-round flow of green fodder, and shortages of quality forage are a persistent constraint on milk productivity for smallholders. A hybrid that can be cut multiple times, or that produces more tillers and therefore more leaf and stem material per plant, directly addresses the economics of fodder production. Higher dry matter yield also matters for silage making, since the energy density of fermented feed depends on the amount of dry material packed into each tonne of green chop.

From a genetic resources perspective, the release of DFH-2 also represents an important act of germplasm registration and documentation. By publishing the varietal description in a peer-reviewed journal, the breeding team has created a permanent record of the hybrid’s identity, pedigree concept and distinctive traits, which allows other breeders to request material, use it in crossing programs, and cite it in their own work. Crop wild relatives such as parviglumis teosinte are increasingly viewed as essential reservoirs of genetic diversity for traits like stress tolerance, tillering and nutritional quality, and DFH-2 demonstrates that such diversity can be moved into commercial products rather than remaining confined to gene banks and research plots.

The breeding program itself was carried out under the All India Coordinated Research Project on Maize, the national network that evaluates maize hybrids across the country’s diverse agro-ecologies before any variety can be recommended for release. The authors note that no separate funding was received during variety development beyond the support of this project framework. The varietal notification article, received in January 2026, revised in February and published online on 12 March 2026 in volume 86 of the journal, serves as the formal scientific documentation accompanying the government notification, a standard practice in the Indian varietal system that links official release with published evidence.

For the broader plant breeding community, DFH-2 offers a case study in how inter-subspecific hybridization can be converted from an academic curiosity into a deployable technology. Single-cross hybrids, produced by crossing two inbred lines, are the standard commercial format in maize because they deliver uniformity and maximum heterosis, the vigor that arises when genetically divergent lines are combined. Crossing an elite maize inbred with a teosinte-derived line introduces an even wider genetic gap, and the resulting heterosis appears to express itself in exactly the traits that forage farmers value: vegetative vigor, tillering and biomass accumulation. The trade-offs that make teosinte unsuitable for grain production, such as its small, encased seeds, are largely irrelevant in a forage crop, which is harvested before grain maturity and valued for its stems and leaves.

As DFH-2 moves into farmers’ fields across eight states, attention will turn to how its unusual plant architecture performs under real management conditions, from sowing density to cutting schedules to silage quality. The hybrid’s notification for both the Northern Western and Central zones suggests that the testing network found it stable across a wide band of environments. For a crop that began its journey with a cross between a domesticated staple and the wild grass that gave rise to it, the path from experiment to notification is a reminder that some of the most forward-looking tools in modern agriculture come from reaching back into the deepest layers of a crop’s evolutionary history.

Subject of Research: Development and release of the first maize-teosinte inter-subspecies forage hybrid

Article Title: Pant Forage Maize Hybrid-1 (DFH-2)

Article References: Yadav, S., & Singh, N. K. (2026). Pant Forage Maize Hybrid-1 (DFH-2). Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding, 86(2), 258-259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44489-026-00013-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44489-026-00013-4

Keywords: maize, teosinte, forage hybrid, plant breeding, crop wild relatives, Zea mays, tillering, multi-cut forage, dairy farming, germplasm registration, India, varietal release

The genetic origin of PAU Bt 5 reflects a deliberate, multi-generation breeding strategy. The variety emerged through pedigree selection from the cross LH 2298 × PAU Bt 1, combining an elite adapted breeding line with an established Bt parent. Pedigree selection is one of the classical methods of plant breeding: after the initial hybridization, segregating generations are advanced and individual plants with superior combinations of traits are selected and selfed across successive seasons until genetic uniformity is achieved. Because the method retains the segregation products of a controlled cross, it allows breeders to shuffle the genomes of two parents and recover novel recombinant lines that outperform both. In the case of PAU Bt 5, that recombinant advantage translated into a statistically meaningful yield margin over its own Bt parent, PAU Bt 1, as well as over other commercial and local checks.

The evidence base for the release rests on the All India Coordinated Research Project on Cotton, the national testing network that evaluates candidate varieties across locations before they are recommended to farmers. Fifteen coordinated trials conducted between 2019 and 2022 across five locations in the North Zone formed the evaluation set. Across those environments, PAU Bt 5 recorded a mean seed cotton yield of 2,572 kilograms per hectare, a figure that represents the combined weight of harvested lint and seed picked from the fields. The variety outperformed PAU Bt 1 by 20.1 percent and PAU Bt 2 by 21.8 percent, while exceeding the check variety F 2228 by a marginal 0.25 percent and local checks by 8.18 percent. Consistent superiority across locations and seasons is a key criterion in varietal release because farmers need performance that is stable, not a one-season fluke.

Yield alone does not determine commercial success; the quality of the fibre and the efficiency of ginning are equally decisive for both farmers and the textile industry. In ginning trials, PAU Bt 5 produced a ginning outturn of 35.8 percent, meaning that roughly a third of the weight of seed cotton delivered to the gin emerges as saleable lint. Fibre analysis showed an upper half mean length of 26.2 millimetres, a micronaire value of 4.9 and a fibre strength of 26.4 grams per tex. Each of these parameters has a direct industrial interpretation. Upper half mean length measures the length of the longer half of the fibres and influences yarn evenness and spinning performance. Micronaire, a combined measure of fineness and maturity, sits within the range preferred by spinners when it falls between roughly 4.3 and 4.9, and PAU Bt 5 lies at the upper boundary of that range. Fibre strength in grams per tex indicates the force needed to break a bundle of fibres of unit linear density, and higher values allow finer, stronger yarns to be spun without breakages.

Disease resistance is the third pillar of the variety’s agronomic package, and it addresses some of the most persistent threats to cotton in northwestern India. PAU Bt 5 was classified as moderately resistant to cotton leaf curl disease, a viral condition transmitted by the whitefly that causes leaf deformation, stunting and yield losses across the region. More favourably, the variety showed resistance to fungal foliar leaf spot and to bacterial leaf blight, two foliar diseases that can compromise canopy health and photosynthetic capacity during the growing season. Resistance breeding matters because chemical control of these diseases is often imperfect and costly, and because farmers in the region already face heavy management burdens from insect pests. Embedding genetic resistance into an elite Bt variety reduces the need for protective sprays and provides a more durable, low-input form of protection.

The technical foundation of the variety lies in Bt technology itself, the insect-resistance system that has reshaped cotton production in India since its introduction. Bt cotton carries genes derived from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, which encode proteins toxic to specific lepidopteran pests, notably the American bollworm complex that historically devastated Indian cotton crops. When susceptible larvae feed on any plant tissue, the ingested Bt proteins are activated in the alkaline midgut, binding to receptors and disrupting the gut epithelium, which halts feeding and kills the insect. For farmers, the practical consequence is a dramatic reduction in insecticide applications targeted at bollworms, lower production costs and reduced chemical exposure. Because PAU Bt 5 combines this insect protection with publicly bred genetic background, it offers farmers an alternative to proprietary hybrid Bt seed while remaining subject to the same resistance-management obligations that govern all Bt cotton cultivation.

The varietal context of the release also deserves attention. Unlike single-cross hybrids, which must be purchased fresh each season because their advantage collapses in the second generation, a pureline variety such as PAU Bt 5 breeds true, and its registration as germplasm secures its identity and availability for future breeding. The registration process formally documents the genetic stock in a national repository, making the material accessible to other breeders who may wish to use it as a parent in their own crossing programmes. In this sense the contribution of the Ludhiana team extends beyond the immediate commercial release: the variety becomes a building block for the wider improvement of American cotton, or Gossypium hirsutum, in South Asia. Public varieties also tend to keep seed costs down, an important consideration given the economic pressures on smallholder cotton farmers.

The regional focus of the release is equally deliberate. Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan together constitute the North Zone of Indian cotton cultivation, an intensively irrigated system in which cotton is grown during the monsoon-assisted kharif season under assured water supply. Conditions in this zone differ sharply from the rainfed central and southern cotton regions, in terms of both soil type and the spectrum of pest and disease pressure. The whitefly-transmitted cotton leaf curl virus, for example, is a distinctly North Zone problem, which makes moderate resistance to that disease a regionally targeted trait rather than a generic one. The coordinated trial system ensures that varieties are tested under precisely these conditions before recommendation, and the 2019 to 2022 trial window captured meaningful environmental variation across the zone, lending robustness to the performance claims.

For the farming community, the sum of these attributes is a coherent value proposition. A mean seed cotton yield approaching 2.6 tonnes per hectare, double-digit percentage advantages over the two preceding Bt varieties from the same programme, ginning outturn and fibre traits that meet spinning-industry expectations, and layered resistance to three significant diseases together describe a variety engineered for dependability as much as for peak performance. The work was conducted under the All India Coordinated Research Project on Cotton and the State Research Scheme of Punjab Agricultural University, without any dedicated external grant, underscoring the role of sustained public investment in agricultural research. As insect resistance management, refuge planting and stewardship of Bt technology continue to evolve, varieties such as PAU Bt 5 demonstrate that conventional breeding excellence and transgenic protection can be integrated to deliver measurable gains, and that publicly developed germplasm remains a vital source of resilience for one of India’s most economically important crops.

Subject of Research: Development and evaluation of the high-yielding Bt cotton variety PAU Bt 5 for irrigated cultivation in North India

Article Title: American Cotton Bt Variety- PAU Bt 5 (PBH Bt 21)

Article References: Singh, P., Kumar, V., Grover, G., Rathore, P., Pathak, D., & Kumar, H. (2026). American Cotton Bt Variety- PAU Bt 5 (PBH Bt 21). Indian Journal of Genetics and Plant Breeding, 86(3), 385-386. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44489-026-00034-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44489-026-00034-z

Keywords: Bt cotton, Gossypium hirsutum, plant breeding, Punjab Agricultural University, cotton yield, fibre quality, disease resistance, cotton leaf curl disease, pedigree selection, AICRP Cotton, North India, varietal release