Genetic Enhancement in Major Food Legumes: An Overview

Farming communities, around the world, who earn their livelihoods through their hard work with limited resources and many times under unfriendly and risky agricultural environments are the main providers of plant proteins to masses by cultivating legumes. Besides proteins, legumes also contain valuable vitamins, mineral and fibre necessary for nutritional security. Globally, over a dozen legume species are cultivated in different agro-ecologies and cropping systems, but seven of them, namely, soybean (Glycine max), groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), lentil (Lens culinaris) and pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan), hold promise with respect to their adaptation, productivity, international trade and consumer preferences. Legumes as a group, unfortunately, carry a tag of low productivity, and in spite of reasonable research efforts in general, their yield enhancement goals still remain unfulfilled. For this bottleneck various factors such as lack of high yielding cultivars, low research priority, inadequate inputs, relegation of the crops to second-grade lands, disease and insect losses and use of the age-old research tools and technologies can be held responsible. It seems that legume researchers have already lost valuable time and opportunities to provide farmers with high yielding cultivars with wide adaptation and incurring least damage due to biotic and abiotic stresses. Presently, the adverse effects of climate changes are also looming large, and hence, there is compelling need to re-emphasize the research priorities on a global basis. To highlight the importance of legumes to the human race and to make the legumes (including pulses) affordable to the poor, the 68th session of the UN General Assembly declared 2016 as the “International Year of Pulses”. It seems now the time is ripe to revisit the production trends and key constraints facing legumes and develop smart R&D plans, keeping in view the recent developments in the fields of genomics, genetic engineering/editing, crop breeding, agronomy and technology transfer. Therefore, there was a need to document these advances that can help the research community to develop a road map. In view of this, we have brought the experts working in different areas of legumes together to document their experiences and provide a road map through this book.