Plant vigour QTLs co-map with an earlier reported QTL hotspot for drought tolerance while water saving QTLs map in other regions of the chickpea genome.

Earlier reported drought tolerance hotspot is a vigour locus. The fact that canopy conductance traits, i.e. the other important determinant of plant water use, mapped on CaLG03 provides an opportunity to manipulate these loci to tailor recombinants having low/high transpiration rate and plant vigour, fitted to specific drought stress scenarios in chickpea.