Physiology Based Approaches for Breeding of Next-Generation Food Legumes

Abstract

Plant breeders and agricultural scientists of the 21st century are challenged to increase the yield potentials of crops to feed the growing world population. Climate change, the resultant stresses and increasing nutrient deficiencies are factors that are to be considered in designing modern plant breeding pipelines. Underutilized food legumes have the potential to address these issues and ensure food security in developing nations of the world. Food legumes in the past have drawn limited research funding and technological attention when compared to cereal crops. Physiological breeding strategies that were proven to be successful in cereals are to be adapted to legume crop improvement to realize their potential. The gap between breeders and physiologists should be narrowed by collaborative approaches to understand complex traits in legumes. This review discusses the potential of physiology based approaches in food legume breeding and how they impact yield gains and abiotic stress tolerance in these crops. The influence of roots and root system architectures in food legumes’ breeding is also discussed. Molecular breeding to map the relevant physiological traits and the potentials of gene editing those traits are detailed. It is imperative to unlock the potentials of these underutilized crops to attain sustainable environmental and nutritional food security.

Sowing Date Affects the Timing and Duration of Key Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) Growth Phases

“…Crop plants have a range of avoidance or tolerance strategies in order to survive abiotic constraints [ 7 ]. Early phenology is a common crop strategy of escaping late season stresses and facilitates adaptation to short season environments.…”

Breeding for Abiotic Stress Adaptation in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.): A Comprehensive Review

“…Plants utilize a variety of strategies to cope under stressful growing conditions, with escaping stress being the most effective, avoidance being the second-best strategy, and tolerance being the last resort as it results in severe yield penalties [26,27]. Abiotic stresses are major constraints to chickpea production in most regions with the most encountered ones being extreme temperatures (high and low), and moisture stress (drought).…”

“…Drought stress arises if precipitation is significantly less than evaporation during the growing season, with water use efficiency and transpiration efficiency (TE) being important traits for drought tolerance in pulse crops [27]. Continuous drought from the onset of the season has significant effects by either not allowing planting or impacting proper establishment, ultimately reducing productivity.…”

“…Drought can be terminal, allowing early maturing genotypes to escape, or cyclic which are periods of drought interspersed by water availability as is often experienced in Mediterranean regions such as the southern parts of Australia. Therefore, sustainable productivity under drought conditions can be achieved through escape due to early phenology, avoidance through deep and expansive root traits which allows longer duration genotypes to extract water and maintain the plant-water balance, or tolerance through osmotic adjustment and TE [24,27,55].…”

First method for dissolving zinc thiazole and re-evaluation of its antibacterial properties against rice bacterial blight disease

“…It has been speculated that human world population will reach 9.7 billion by 2050 (Sessitsch et al 2018), which indicates that global food production will have to be more than doubled at that time (Green et al 2018). Therefore, it is extremely necessary to explore new methodologies, tools and processes to support and improve crop production (Shunmugam et al 2018). Plant diseases, mainly caused by bacterial (Mansfield et al 2012), viral (Scholthof et al 2011) and fungal pathogens (Dean et al 2012), and parasitic nematodes (Jones et al 2013), are the main limiting factors of crop yields (Anglin et al 2018).…”