Genome analysis is essential in the present scenario of developments in the field of genetics to thoroughly understand the structure and evolution of genomes. Structural details of genomes lead one to correlate them to proteomes involved in function and regulation at cellular level. Such analyses enhance our insight into the themes of developmental biology, neurobiology and molecular medicine. Genome analysis is applied in phylogenetics, genetic mapping of quantitative and qualitative traits, intra specific variation, evolutionary biology and population genetics. A recent meeting of researchers in Portugal felt the necessity of experimental models to study such aspects. The model organisms available at present are Arabidopsis thaliana, Caenorhabditis elegans, Mus musculus, Sus scrofa scrofa (Swine) etc.

Recent progress in molecular phylogeny has provided trees that project a reference frame for discussing the still controversial evolution of anatomical and physiological designs. This led to the overall image of a fairly simple global tree of metazoans, comprising only a small number of major clusters forming branches of phylogenetic tree indicating conserved developmental genes. On the other hand, research is going on plant genomes for growth and development, cell signaling and gene regulation, nutrition, water relations and gas exchange, biotic interactions, symbiosis and abiotic stress in plants.

Here, we summarize the contributions to this volume representing almost all the above-mentioned aspects.

The first article, "Studies on Some Important Floral Traits of cGms Lines of Hybrid Rice (Oryza sativa L.)", by M Umadevi, P Veerabadhiran, S Manonmani and P Shanmugasundaram, elucidated the importance of superior cytoplasmic male sterile lines in the production of hybrid rice. They evaluated a number of characteristics, namely, 50% flowering, glume angle, panicle exsertion percentage, stigma exsertion percentage, pollen sterility percentage, awning, spikelet fertility percentage and outcrossing percentage in these lines for their performance.

The authors, A Nirmalakumari, M Vetriventha, in the second article, "Phenotypic Analysis of Anther and Pollen in Diversified Genotype of Barnyard Millet (Echinochloa frumentaceae) Floral Characters", investigated the scope of variability in germplasm collection of barnyard millet (Echinochloa frumentacea) for its crop improvement and evolution of new high yielding varieties through hybridization and selection.

The third article, "Variability Studies in Rice (Oryza sativa L.) for Salt Tolerance" by the authors, K Seetharam, S Thirumeni and K Paramasivam, indicated that Ward's method was superior over Tocher's method in resolving genotypes into different clusters of genomes for salt tolerance considering yield-related traits.

The authors, P E Rajasekharan, S R Ambika and S Ganeshan in the fourth article,"In-Vitro Conservation of Tylophora indica: A Threatened Medicinal Plant", developed a protocol for in-vitro multiplication of a medicinal plant Tylophora indica and presented its importance.

The fifth article, "Genetics of Yield and Other Traits in American Cotton", by the authors, Kaushik S K and Kapoor C J, is a study to evaluate combining ability and their interactions with environments. The best general combiners in all the environments were identified as C-2602-WIR-6109 for monopodia per plant and seed cotton yield, LH 1861 for bolls per plant and RS 2115 for seeds per boll. Crosses exhibiting highest sca effects coupled with high per se performance were LH 1836 x H 1123 for plant height, bolls per plant, seed index and seed cotton yield and PIL 8-5 x RS 2115 for plant height and seeds per boll.

The authors, Musfiqua Mookerjee, Subhasis Maity and Madhumita Mukherjee, in the sixth article, "In-Vitro Antimicrobial Activity of Non-antibiotic Drugs Against Pathogenic Fish Isolates", discussed on antimicrobial activity of non-antibiotic drugs such as trimeprazine an analgesic compound, trifluoperazine an antipsychotic drug and promethazine an antihistamine with strong sedative effects, which were found to possess significant antibacterial action against 12 genera of pathogenic bacteria which were isolated from diseased edible fishes collected from the water bodies (bheries) of the east Kolkata wetlands in West Bengal, India.

The seventh article, "Molecular Characterization of Coimbatore Breed of Sheep (Ovis aries) in South India", by the authors, P Kumarasamy, S Prema and P Ganapathi, S M K Karthickeyan and P Kanakaraj, analyzed microsatellite markers which exhibited high heterozygosity maintained in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE), indicative of the higher amount of genetic variability that can be exploited for their improvement.

The eighth article, "Karyoanalysis Among Diploid Banana (Musa species) Accessions", by Rekha A and S C Hiremath, is an attempt to study the karyotypes of some Musa species and diploid cultivars to understand the karyology and homology of chromosomes which revealed that there were differences among the Musa species and cultivars for the total chromosome length.

The authors, S D Wahi, Sukanta Dash and A R Rao in their article, "An Empirical Investigation on Classical Clustering Methods", compared the performance of different clustering methods based on average percentage probability of misclassification and its standard error. The performance of different hierarchical clustering methods varied with distance measures used and it was found that squared Euclidean performed best among the five distance methods.

-- V Venugopal Rao
Consulting Editor