Understanding patterns of abiotic and biotic stress resilience to unleash the potential of crop wild relatives for climate-smart legume breeding

Although new varieties are urgently needed for climate-smart legume production, legume breeding lags behind with cereals and underutilizes wild relatives. This paper provides insights in patterns of abiotic and biotic stress resilience of legume crops and wild relatives to enhance the use and conservation of these genetic resources for climate-smart legume breeding. We focus onVigna, a pantropical genus with more than 88 taxa including important crops such as cowpea and mung bean. Sources of pest and disease resistance occur in more than 50 percent of theVignataxa, which were screened while sources of abiotic stress resilience occur in less than 20 percent of the taxa, which were screened. This difference suggests thatVignataxa co-evolve with pests and diseases while taxa are more conservative to adapt to climatic changes and salinization. Twenty-twoVignataxa are poorly conserved in genebanks or not at all. This germplasm is not available for legume breeding and requires urgent germplasm collecting before these taxa extirpate on farm and in the wild.Vignataxa, which tolerate heat and drought stress are rare compared with taxa, which escape these stresses or tolerate salinity. These rareVignataxa should be prioritized for conservation and screening for multifunctional traits of combined abiotic and biotic stress resilience. The high presence of salinity tolerance compared with drought stress tolerance, suggests thatVignataxa are good at developing salt-tolerant traits compared with drought-tolerant traits.Vignataxa are therefore of high value for legume production in areas that suffer from salinization.

David Bond and Jean Picard: Two pivotal breeders of faba bean in the 20th century

David Bond and Jean Picard, two leaders of European legume breeding, died within a few months of each other. On the basis of their agronomic and genetic training, they both met the challenge of breeding faba bean, a protein-rich species that had received little attention from breeders before the 1950s (Picard, 1953; Bond 1957). Both made great strides at modernizing their chosen crop by developing and applying new ideas and techniques, as well as generating new methods and genetic materials.

Legume breeding for broomrape resistance

Legume cultivation is hampered in Mediterranean regions by the occurrence of the root parasitic weeds Orobanche crenata (crenate broomrape) and Orobanche foetida (foetida broomrape). Strategies of control have been developed but only marginal successes have been achieved. Most control methods are unfeasible, uneconomical, and hard to achieve or result in incomplete protection. Breeding for resistance is possible, but is hampered by the lack of sufficient levels of resistance, the complexity of its inheritance and the unreliability of available screening methods. Recent achievements in the identification of resistance levels and their deployment in breeding programmes will be presented and critically discussed.

Biotechnology in Legume Breeding – International Workshop organised on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of agrobiological research and plant breeding at Šumperk

This article does not have an abstract.