Genetic and Genomic Resources of Grain Legume Improvement

Download or read book Genetic and Genomic Resources of Grain Legume Improvement written by Mohar Singh and published by Elsevier Inc. Chapters. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grain legumes mainly consisting of common bean, pea, chickpea, faba bean, cowpea, lentil, pigeon pea, peanut, Asian Vigna species, grass pea and horsegram are under cultivation in a considerable area worldwide. With their higher protein content and symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in root nodules enabling them to fix their own nitrogen, reducing the fertilizer use in agriculture has become very important for the production systems. For most of these important grain legumes, a large number of germplasm accessions were characterized and evaluated for various agro-morphological traits, including biotic, abiotic and quality parameters. Core and mini-core collections have also been developed for the majority of grain legumes; they were further evaluated for different parameters. From these genetic resources, potential donors of desirable traits have been selected after evaluation and characterization and have been utilized in the genetic improvement of cultivars. Current available genomic resources and technologies can facilitate allele mining for novel traits of interest and incorporation from wild relatives into elite domestic genetic backgrounds.