Legume Breeding in Transition: Innovation and Outlook

Download or read book Legume Breeding in Transition: Innovation and Outlook written by Rafiul Amin Laskar and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2023-09-06 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legumes (family Fabaceae) comprise a diverse range of crops grown worldwide, which are important constituents of sustainable agriculture and harbour a role in improving human and livestock health. Legumes serve as a rich source of plant-based proteins, rank second in nutrition value after cereals, and are ideal to supplement a protein-deficient cereal-based human diet. Legumes also provide other essential services to agriculture through their ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen, recycle nutrients, enhance soil carbon content, and diversify cropping systems. Legume production and seed quality are affected by a range of biotic (pests, insect diseases, and weeds) and abiotic stresses (drought, heat, frost, and salinity). In addition to this, rapidly changing climate, shrinking arable land, erratic rainfalls, and depleting water and other natural resources impact legume production and threaten food and nutrition security worldwide. Persistent demand for legume crops is existing to fulfil the food requirements of an ever-growing human population. Therefore, legume breeders and geneticists have employed different conventional and modern breeding strategies to improve yield, resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses, grain quality, and nutritional and nutraceutical properties. Conventional breeding strategies are laborious, time consuming, expensive, and inefficient to achieve the desired goals. However, advanced breeding techniques such as alien gene introgression, genomics-assisted breeding, transgenic technology, speed breeding, association and mapping studies, genome editing, and omics will contribute to sustainable agriculture and food security.