Back To The Future: Prospecting Wild Crop Relatives For Crop Improvement Of Chickpea

R. Varma Penmetsa¹, Peter Chang¹, Abdullah Kahraman², Jens Berger³, Bekir Bukun⁴, Abdulkadir Aydogan⁵, Noelia Carrasquilla-Garcia¹, Alex Greenspan¹, Reyaz Mir¹, Bullo Mamo¹, Lisa Vance¹, Emily Warschefsky⁶, Emmanuel Dacosta-Calheiros⁶, Lijalem Korbu¹, Emily Bergmann¹, Wendy Vu⁷, Sergey V. Nuzhdin⁷, Eric von Wettberg⁶, Douglas R. Cook¹

¹University of California,  Davis, USA;  ²Harran University, Sanliurfa, Turkey;  ³CSIRO, Perth, Australia;  ⁴Dicle University, Diyarbakir, Turkey;  ⁵GDAR, Ankara, Turkey;  ⁶Florida International University, Miami, USA;  ⁷University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA

As in other crops, domestication of the food legume chickpea has been accompanied by reduced genetic diversity. A consortium of chickpea researchers are examining chickpea and its wild crop relatives to understand adaptations to wild and cultivated habitats, to identify the genetic architecture of domestication driven shifts in traits, and to develop introgression pre-breeding populations with potential for improved agronomic performance. Two wild species with annual life cycles are the focus of these studies: Cicer reticulatum, the progenitor of the cultigen, and Cicer echinospermum, a closely related annual Cicer species from the secondary gene pool.

Previous analysis of a wild by cultivated recombinant inbred population indicated that a small number of QTLs underlie the differences between wild and cultivated chickpea for plant growth habit, flowering time and nodule numbers per plant. The genetic architecture of these traits is currently being examined in additional wild by cultivated F2 populations. Results from these ongoing studies will be presented.