Does marker assisted breeding in common bean have a pulse?

Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) representing both dry edible and snap (green or garden beans) bean, is the most widely grown and consumed pulse crop in the world.  Beans are produced on 45 M ha worldwide. Cultivar improvement is critical for sustainable production and to meet growing demand for beans. Many bean breeders include some form of marker-assisted breeding in their germplasm and cultivar development pipelines. Marker-assisted selection or detection of specific loci primarily conditioning disease resistance has been commonplace since the early 1990s.  Marker-assisted breeding for more complex traits like drought tolerance, quality factors, or yield, has not been developed yet. Marker-assisted breeding for performance traits based on haplotypes across whole genomes is in the exploratory phase.  Limited economy of scale may restrict routine application of genomic assisted breeding in bean. A reference genome for common bean was recently published. This new resource has facilitated increased marker densities, GWAS, and candidate gene discovery for simple and complexly inherited traits. Although the number of papers on genomic characterization of traits and QTL have skyrocketed with the advent of these new tools, few validated markers for applied selection of the studied traits have been forthcoming.  Many breeders are revisiting old genetic populations with a goal of increasing marker densities (SNPs primarily) for physically mapping important genes and QTL, hopefully leading to markers more tightly linked with their targets and easier to assay for MAS applications.  Recent discoveries of markers with application for MAS will be reviewed.   Marker-assisted breeding in beans does have a pulse that will continue to get stronger as we learn how to better capitalize on the new genomic tools becoming available.