
Pearl millet leaf blast is caused by Magnaporthe grisea (Anamorph, Pyricularia grisea) has been recently emerged as devastating disease with economic significance in India. It is well-known that host plant resistance is the most economical strategy to effectively manage this disease; hence, identification of resistance sources for blast disease is important to incorporate resistance genes into elite breeding lines. On the other hand, fungal cell wall is a multi-layered, in which chitin and glucan are the major polysaccharide constituents (Figure 1). In this view, chitinases and glucanases gain significant attention as antifungal enzymes. These were produced as pathogenesis related (PR) hydrolses in plants with constitutive expression in seeds, leaves, flowers, tubers and induced upon pathogen invasion. They exert their defensive role by decomposing the fungal cell wall polysaccharides chitin and glucan into respective monomers as N-Acetyl D-glucosamine and D-glucose residues (Prasannath, 2017). Whereas, protease inhibitors (PIs) are known to participate in defensive role by inhibiting the extracellular protease activity secretes from actively growing fungal mycelia as well as cysteine proteases involved in the chitin synthase activity (Joshi et al., 1998). Hence, the present study is focused on the screening of chitinases, glucanases and cysteine protease inhibitors in ten pearl millet seed proteins with differential disease resistance and evaluation of their anti fungal efficacy against growth of P. grisea (Pg 45), prevalent isolate in Hyderabad, Telangana region.