Genomics Enabled Improvement of Lentil

Lentil (Lens culinaris ssp culinaris Medic) is a diploid (2n = 2X = 14) self-pollinating crop with a genome size of 4 Gbp/C.  It is a protein and micro-nutrients rich food legume crop which plays an important role in human nutrition and sustainable agriculture. The global production of lentil falls short of its demand and, thus, requires innovative breeding approaches to raise its productivity. In lentil, use of genomics tools in the breeding programs has been limited, since available genomic resources are not adequate. Recent advances in high-throughput phenotyping, genotyping and sequencing technologies have given new impetus to the development of genetic and genomic resources and high resolution marker-trait association. Recent reports on the identification of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from transcriptome sequencing data, utilization of expressed sequence tag (EST)-derived simple sequence repeat (SSR) and SNP markers for construction of a gene-based genetic linkage map, and identification of markers in close linkage to major QTLs for traits of interest have opened up new opportunity to improve lentil. Their integration in marker-assisted breeding is expected to improve the precision and efficiency in breeding programs with accelerated and directed genetic gains. Molecular markers are expected to facilitate indirect selection for difficult traits, introgression of novel genes into adapted varieties, pyramiding genes from different sources, and combining multiple stress resistance. Recent efforts of University of Saskatchewan, UC-Davis, La Trobe University and ICARDA towards complete lentil genome sequencing will further boost the genomics enabled lentil improvement.