Ecological Genomics at Chickpea's Center of Origin: Mining Wild Crop Relatives for Climate Resilience and Nitrogen Fixation for Crop Improvement in the Developing World

All domesticated species are impacted in unintended, often negative ways during domestication and breeding. Their narrow genetic status derives from random demographic processes and from changes in the nature of selection during breeding and cultivation. Loss of adaptive alleles, fixation of deleterious alleles, and low genetic diversity in cultivated species necessarily constrains our ability to expand the cultivation of domesticated species into environments beyond those under which domestication occurred, e.g., into more extreme climates, marginal soils, or with reduced agricultural inputs. We are addressing this need in chickpea, the world’s second most important pulse legume, by harnessing the capacity of wild relatives to survive in harsh environments. Chickpea is a global commodity of critical importance to food security in low income, food deficit countries, but also in developed countries. Effective use of wild germplasm in chickpea improvement requires new and systematic surveys of genotypes from natural environments, identification of adaptive alleles to environmental extremes, and incorporation of the diversity of wild alleles into purpose driven populations for trait analysis and breeding. We focus on climate resilience, nitrogen fixation and seed nutrient density, with the goal of more sustainable and stable production systems. We combine upstream ecology and genomics to assemble and characterize wild germplam and to identify and characterize high value genes; population development to remove barriers to use of wild alleles for trait assessment and breeding; and phenotyping and modeling of trait-gene associations to enhance the precision and rate with which wild alleles are applied to crop improvement.