Genetic and Genomic Resources of Grain Legume Improvement

Mohar Singh · Hari D. Upadhyaya · I. S. Bisht

Jul 2013 · Newnes

About this ebook

Grain legumes, including common-bean, chickpea, pigeonpea, pea, cowpea, lentil and others, form important constituents of global diets, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. Despite this significant role, global production has increased only marginally in the past 50 years. The slow production growth, along with a rising human population and improved buying capacity has substantially reduced the per capita availability of food legumes. Changes in environmental climate have also had significant impact on production, creating a need to identify stable donors among genetic resources for environmentally robust genes and designing crops resilient to climate change.

Genetic and Genomic Resources of Grain Legume Improvement is the first book to bring together the latest resources in plant genetics and genomics to facilitate the identification of specific germplasm, trait mapping and allele mining to more effectively develop biotic and abiotic-stress-resistant grains. This book will be an invaluable resource for researchers, crop biologists and students working with crop development.

• Explores origin, distribution and diversity of grain legumes
• Presents information on germplasm collection, evaluation and maintenance
• Offers insight into pre-breeding/germplasm enhancement efforts
• Integrates genomic and genetic resources in crop improvement
• Internationally contributed work

About the author

Dr Mohar Singh has made an outstanding contribution in the management of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in India. His research interest reflects a continuum of high quality basic and strategic research in pulses. He has developed 3 core sets, 2 reference sets, registered 4 genetic stocks, 25 gene sequences, 06 farmer varieties and 2 lentil varieties developed through distant hybridization for rainfed areas of north-western Indian himalaya. Conducted 10 explorations on crop wild relatives (CWRs) and explored >900 wild germplasm of cereals, oilseeds and pulses. He is instrumental to initiate pre-breeding in chickpea and lentil in India for securing national nutritional demand. His pioneer research work on understanding the population structure and diversity assessment of global wild species of lentil and chickpea is very well known. This has led to the identification of most target gene sources in the secondary and tertiary gene pool of chickpea and lentil for biofortification of cultivated varieties including several yield and major biotic and abiotic stress related traits were successfully incorporated in cultivated backgrounds of these two important pulse crops. Successful deployment of marker assisted breeding for introgression of two most promising superior haplotypes with high seed weight and high pod number from cultivated and wild species into high yielding varieties of chickpea for improving their overall yield and productivity. Dr Singh has a distinguished record of high quality peer research publications to his credit including scientific reports, DNA Research, Plant Science, Frontiers in Plant Science, PLOS ONE, Plant Breeding, Crop Science, Euphytica, Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution, Journal of Experimental Biology, Plant Genetic Resources of Cambridge, Journal of Genetics, Journal of Environmental Biology, Advances in Hort Science, Journal of Genetics and Breeding, and Indian J. Genet. He is recipient of Harbhajan Memorial Award.