The plant has immense economic value as an oil-seed plant as well as a host plant of iri silkworm. Iri silk is indigenous to eastern India, and, in spite of the presence of toxic lectin ricin inside the plant body, the silkworm caterpillars could ingest and survive beautifully. We are reporting here existence of Stowaway-like sequence in castor genotypes. Therefore, we assume that the element could cross the dicot-monocot barrier. However, practically, no information is available on their genome constituents.
Present attempt is to link leaf traits of the plant with DNA markers.
During that study we could notice that castor genome contains several copies of rice-specific transposable elements. Some of them were amplified after insertion into castor genome. The degree of their amplification varies within genotrophs. DNA polymorphism could be noticed in segregating population, after PCR amplification. More than 350 polymorphic amplicons could be counted using 35 primers.