Recent developments in Lablab purpureus genomics: A focus on drought stress tolerance and use of genomic resources to develop stress-resilient varieties

This research article published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2021Drought is a major climatic challenge that contributes significantly to the decline of food productivity. One of the strategies to overcome this challenge is the use of drought-tolerant crops with a wide range of benefits. Lablab is a leguminous crop that has been showing high promise to drought tolerance. It is reported to have higher drought resilience compared with the commonly cultivated legumes such as common beans and cowpeas. Because of its great genetic diversity, Lablab can withstand high temperature and low rainfall, unlike other related crops. On top of that, it is grown for multitudes of purposes including food, forages, conservation agriculture, and improved soil fertility. To enhance its production and benefits during the present effects of climate change, it is crucial to develop improved varieties that would overcome the challenge of drought stress. In the past years, there have been several reviews on Lablab based on origin, domestication, characterization, utilization, germplasm conservation, some cultivation constraints, and conventional breeding with limitations on the genomic exploitation of the crop for drought tolerance. Conventional breeding is the major breeding technique for many Lablab cultivars. The integration of genomic, physiological, biochemical, and molecular approaches would be required to develop drought-tolerant cultivars of Lablab. In this review, we discuss recent developments in Lablab genomics with a focus on drought stress tolerance and the use of genomic resources to develop stress-resilient varieties

Recent advancement in modern genomic tools for adaptation of Lablab purpureus L to biotic and abiotic stresses: present mechanisms and future adaptations

Not AvailableHyacinth bean is an important traditional plant with substantial medicinal value. Being imperative, it is still less explored crop on genomic and transcriptomic scale that has indexed it as an “orphan” crop for its genome revolution. Among different crop legumes such as pigeon pea, chickpea, cowpea, soybean and common bean, hyacinth bean also serves as a significant source of nutrition for both tropical and temperate regions and execute an imperative function in fixing biological nitrogen in agriculture. Nonetheless, the productivity of hyacinth bean is restrained due to environmental and biotic cues. Thus, understanding of the genomic functions and identification of probable genes/proteins for major agronomic traits through transcriptomic approaches has become imperative to improve stress tolerance in hyacinth bean. For understanding the plant stress tolerance mechanisms, the deployment of functional genomics approaches viz., proteomics and metabolomics have become imperious in breeding programs in developing countries. These approaches have been successfully used in other legume crops to create protein reference maps and their exploitation through comparative approaches can greatly enhance the research and understanding of hyacinth bean biological processes to changing environmental conditions. In this review, emerging epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics and phenomics approaches and their achievements both in model/crop legumes are discussed. Additionally, the review also provides an overview of the applications of advanced proteomics, metabolomics and next-generation sequencing technologies in the discovery of candidate biomarkers for the development of agronomically refined hyacinth bean which may further ensure food and nutritional security under adverse climacteric conditions in developing countries.Not Availabl