Towards the Development, Maintenance, and Standardized Phenotypic Characterization of Single‐Seed‐Descent Genetic Resources for Common Bean

Abstract

The optimal use of legume genetic resources represents a key prerequisite for coping with current agriculture-related societal challenges, including conservation of agrobiodiversity, agricultural sustainability, food security, and human health. Among legumes, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) is the most economically important for human consumption, and its evolutionary trajectories as a species have been crucial to determining the structure and level of its present and available genetic diversity. Genomic advances are considerably enhancing the characterization and assessment of important genetic variants. For this purpose, the development and availability of, and access to, well-described and efficiently managed genetic resource collections that comprise pure lines derived by single-seed-descent cycles will be paramount for the use of the reservoir of common bean variability and for the advanced breeding of legume crops. This is one of the main aims of the new and challenging European project INCREASE, which is the implementation of Intelligent Collections with appropriate standardized protocols that must be characterized, maintained, and made available, along with the related data, to users such as breeders and researchers.

The INCREASE project: Intelligent Collections of food‐legume genetic resources for European agrofood systems

“…In order to efficiently explore the plant genetic resources diversity, for each crop, INCREASE will assemble and curate Intelligent Collections (ICs, Intelligent as in able to memorize , learn , improve and evolve ) as a set of nested core collections of different sizes that represent the entire diversity of each crop (Cortinovis et al., 2021 ).…”

“…It is envisaged that during MLFTs several phenotypic traits will be scored (e.g., growth habit, plant height, flower color, along with important traits related to grain production, days to flower and maturity, seed and pod number and weight, etc. ), applying crop‐specific phenotyping protocols based on standard crop descriptors, also included in crop ontologies (Cortinovis et al., 2021 ; Guerra‐García et al., 2021 ; Kroc et al., 2021 ). In addition, we will use smart phenotyping tools, based on image analysis for phenotypic data on traits of interest (e.g., seeds, flower, pods and leaves).…”

Towards the Development, Maintenance and Standardized Phenotypic Characterization of Single‐Seed‐Descent Genetic Resources for Chickpea

“…Linking genotypic and phenotypic data will allow identification of the genes and/or genomic regions responsible for important adaptive and agronomic traits and implement genomic selection models to predict phenotypes based on genetic data (Bellucci et al, 2021). Specific protocols to characterize the seeds before and after the selfing cycles (including images of the seeds) and the plants during cultivation under controlled conditions have been established and described for common bean (Cortinovis et al, 2021), lentil (Guerra-García et al, 2021, and lupin (Kroc et al, 2021); here, we describe the specific protocols to be applied for characterization of chickpea SSD lines during the process of development and maintenance of seeds (i.e., the so-called Primary Seed Increase within INCREASE; see Cortinovis et al, 2021). These protocols for chickpea were designed based on highly hereditable seed and plant traits that can be used for phenotypic characterization and to monitor the SSD seed-multiplication process (i.e., check for potential human errors during the different seed-increase cycles).…”

“…Here, we first outline the main aspects of our knowledge of chickpea's evolutionary history and population structure, along with a description of the germplasm collections conserved worldwide and the available genomic resources. In the second part, we present the concept and protocols for developing “Intelligent Collections” (ICs) for chickpea and their phenotypic characterization during the multiplication/seed‐increase steps, as has also been proposed for common bean (Cortinovis et al., 2021), lentil (Guerra‐García et al., 2021), and lupin (Kroc et al., 2021).…”

Towards Development, Maintenance, and Standardized Phenotypic Characterization of Single‐Seed‐Descent Genetic Resources for Lupins

“…This has provided the unique opportunity to develop phenotyping data and to integrate these with genotypic information for thousands of lupin accessions from different sources (e.g., genebanks, research institutes, private companies, project stakeholders). The protocols for exploring the variations within lupins and other food legumes studied within INCREASE (i.e., also chickpea, common bean, lentil; see Current Protocols articles: Guerra‐García, Gioia, Von Wettberg, Logozzo, & Bett, in preparation; Kumar et al., in preparation; and Cortinovis et al., 2021) are being provided to enhance the standardization and data handling of the available genetic resources of these legumes and to increase the effectiveness of their conservation and use (https://www.pulsesincrease.eu).…”