Common Bean Genetics, Breeding, and Genomics for Adaptation to Changing to New Agri-environmental Conditions

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) has become, over the last 20 years, a competitive crop in national, regional, and international markets. This situation presents a dynamic environment for producers and researchers of this crop and requires a rethinking of current strategies against research and production needs, the opportunities and challenges of the future, and adaptation to changing agri-environmental conditions. Improvement of the common bean means possessing in-depth knowledge of its genetic diversity, the genome and gene functions, to enable the analysis of pathways and networks in response to fluctuating environmental conditions. An important long-term challenge is the discovery of the gene(s) that control important production traits such as pest and disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance, and biological fixation of nitrogen. This will need to be a cooperative worldwide effort that involves breeders, geneticists, and genomic and bioinformatics experts. Currently, new technologies built around the recently released common bean genome sequence are now being developed, and various genomic resources for common bean are available and include physical maps, bacterial artificial chromosome libraries, anchored physical and genetic maps, and expressed sequence tags. However, these approaches require precise phenotypic data. Complex interactions between the common bean crop genotype, environmental factors in combination with plant population dynamics and crop management greatly affect plant phenotypes in field experiments and are the key for the expansion of the productivity of this crop in traditional and nontraditional growing areas.