Conventional and new-breeding technologies for improving disease resistance in lentil (Lens culinaris Medik)

Abstract

Lentil, an important cool season food legume, is a rich source of easily digestible protein, folic acid, bio-available iron, and zinc nutrients. Lentil grows mainly as a sole crop in the winter after harvesting rice in South Asia. However, the annual productivity is low due to its slow growth during the early phase, competitive weed infestation, and disease outbreaks during the crop growth period. Disease resistance breeding has been practiced for a long time to enhance resistance to various diseases. Often the sources of resistance are available in wild crop relatives. Thus, wide hybridization and the ovule rescue technique have helped to introgress the resistance trait into cultivated lentils. Besides hybridization, induced mutagenesis contributed immensely in creating variability for disease tolerance, and several disease-resistant mutant lines have been developed. However, to overcome the limitations of traditional breeding approaches, advancement in molecular marker technologies, and genomics has helped to develop disease-resistant and climate-resilient lentil varieties with more precision and efficiency. This review describes types of diseases, disease screening methods, the role of conventional and new breeding technologies in alleviating disease-incurred damage and progress toward making lentil varieties more resilient to disease outbreaks under the shadow of climate change.

Assessment of the phenotypic diversity and agronomic performance of a Mediterranean lentil collection under rainfed conditions: towards efficient use in breeding programs for adaptation to Mediterranean-type environment

“…A range genetic variability is important for the success of a breeding program; in fact, breeders are particularly interested in the diversity presents in genetic resources to develop improved varieties with superior traits such as resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses, increased and stable grain yield, and improved grain quality (Swarup et al 2021). Lentil crop is facing various biotic and abiotic constraints that limit its yield and productivity (Singh et al 2022;Zeroual et al 2022; Roy et al 2023). Therefore, it is important to harness the potential of lentil genetic resources housed in different gene banks around the world to addresses these challenges.…”

Plant breeding is needed to meet agroecological requirements: Legume crops as a case study

“…There are both many different crops and many different pests and diseases that cannot be addressed in this paper. Recent reviews are available covering resistance breeding either by crop (i.e., common bean (Taboada et al, 2022), faba bean (Rubiales and Khazaei, 2022), grasspea (Ellis et al, 2022), mungbean (Nair et al, 2019), lentil (Roy et al, 2023), pea (Parihar et al, 2022), soybean (Lin et al, 2022)), or by groups of diseases or pests (i.e., insect pests (Edwards and Singh, 2006; Keneni et al, 2011); airborne biotrophic pathogens (Sillero et al, 2006; Martins et al, 2020), necrotrophic pathogens (Tivoli et al, 2006; Bilkiss et al, 2019), soil pathogens (Wohor et al, 2022), parasitic weeds (Rubiales et al, 2006; Rubiales, 2018), nematodes (Ruanpanun and Somta, 2021) or viral diseases (Jha et al, 2023) among others). Attention is needed to better understand not only the genetic basis of resistance, but also the biology of the pathogens, and monitoring their distribution.…”

The Prospects of gene introgression from crop wild relatives into cultivated lentil for climate change mitigation

“…Recent advances in large-scale genome analyses, such as next generation sequencing (NGS), high throughput genotyping (HTG) and high throughput phenotyping (HTP) have added to the breadth of genetic diversity, development of genomic resources databases and knowledge on phylogenetics in the genus Lens. This information can be used for precise and efficient molecular genetic improvement and enhancement programs of lentils ( Kumar et al., 2021 ; Pratap et al., 2021 ; Hussain et al., 2022 ; Salaria et al., 2022 ; Salgotra and Stewart, 2022 ; Singh et al., 2022a ; Tiwari et al., 2022 ; Civantos-Go´ mez et al., 2022 ; Roy et al., 2023 ; Zeroual et al., 2023 ) similar to what has been achieved in major crops such as rice, wheat and maize ( Yoshino et al., 2019 ; Mishra et al., 2021 ).…”