Tackling Lentil Biotic Stresses in the Genomic Era

Abstract

Lentils are already one of the main pulses of the world, as they are one of the main sources of protein for humans. As a crop, they are also gaining momentum because the rusticity and tolerance to water scarcity of some varieties are a good fit with the current global warming trend and climate change in general. However, while the harvested area and overall production have drastically increased over the last decades, yield has only experienced very modest increments. The reasons are two-fold. First, pathogens are affecting the crop as never before, likely due to not only the changing climate but also to the expansion of lentil cultivation to new geographic areas. Second, genomics-aided breeding is far behind many other crops. This is in partly due to the lack of genomic tools currently available to researchers. Progress is being made to adopt high-throughput genomic methods, and researchers will be able to tackle lentil gene discovery and breeding for pathogen resistance and other biotic stresses more efficiently in the coming years. We outline the current situation, novel findings, and prospects of lentil research for biotic stresses. IntroductionLentil (Lens culinaris Medik. subsp. culinaris) is one of the first domesticated species in the Fertile Crescent and along with barley, emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, pea, chickpea, and flax was part of the set of crops that defined the beginnings of the Neolithic transition to agriculture in this part of the World. The origin of the cultivated form is the wild L. culinaris subsp. orientalis (Boiss.) Ponert (syn. L. orientalis Boiss.). A recent publication by Liber et al. (2021) suggests that phylogenetics, population structure, and archeological data coincide in a lentil domestication prolonged in time in Southwest Asia, with two different domesticated gene pools. From the

Ingenious characterization and assessment of lentil germplasm collection to aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum stress unveils distinct responses

“…Studies have shown that virus epidemics is often due to high aphid populations that spread the virus during their short feeding periods. Surveys conducted in many countries around the globe during the last three decades demonstrated that significant limitation to legume production including lentil, is caused by aphid-borne viruses ( Pérez de la Vega et al., 2022 ).…”