engleski

Genomics research for faba bean (Vicia faba L.) breeding applications

Domesticated in ancient times, faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is now a major food and feed legume, particularly in Eurasia and North Africa. Despite being one of the cytogenetically best characterized plant species, subsequent progress in faba bean genomics has lagged behind other legume crops. Comprehensive genomic and post genomic resources are being developed but the very large and repetitive faba bean genome has so far restricted its sequencing and hampered genetic research and breeding applications. There are over 10 mapping populations established to study the inheritance of agronomic traits in different locations. Different molecular marker sets have been used to construct saturated linkage maps and identify genes/QTLs controlling resistance to crenate broomrape and several fungal major diseases. Recently, markers linked to growth habit and nutritional value of faba bean seeds were also identified. Despite these significant efforts, complete translation of marker discovery to faba bean breeding is still to be achieved. Recent efforts offer great promise for the development of highly accurate selective breeding tools. Thus, transcriptomic analysis (SuperSAGE and cDNA libraries) are enriching the scarce faba bean ESTs libraries providing additional resources for refining the maps with functional markers. Moreover, a combination of candidate gene and colinearity studies is being pursued to identify genes underlying agronomically important traits including seed size, flowering time, disease resistances and plant architecture. Finally, a faba bean functional consensus map is being constructed integrating all the genes and QTLs previously published. These new tools may help researchers to find candidate genes to accelerated improvement of future faba bean cultivars.

faba bean; genomics; genetic map; QTL analysis; consensus map; candidate genes

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