FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS AND GENETIC IMPROVEMENT OF COMMON BEAN: TUNING MERISTEM PLASTICITY TO OPTIMIZE PLANT ARCHITECTURE FOR CLIMATE-RESILIENT AGRICULTURE

FUNCTIONAL GENOMICS AND GENETIC IMPROVEMENT OF COMMON BEAN: TUNING MERISTEM PLASTICITY TO OPTIMIZE PLANT ARCHITECTURE FOR CLIMATE-RESILIENT AGRICULTURE

A most critical challenge to crop production is the attainment of enhanced productivity in farmer’s fields, with minimal ecological footprints, as a sustainable means for addressing the myriad constraints that threaten the 21st century global food security. However, the currently available cultivars of most crops do not fit well into this envisaged highly efficient yet low-input crop production systems, which implies that it will be necessary to identify a new genetic variability useful for its impact on agricultural production. Induced mutagenesis can demonstrably contribute to providing for breeding with raw materials needed to generate the new crop varieties.
Among the cultivated plant species, legumes constitute the second most important family after grasses, and grain legumes as common beans are essential in the human diet. They are also of enormous value in sustainable agriculture since they do not need nitrogen fertilizers since their roots fix atmospheric nitrogen through symbiosis. Finally, they are also interested in developmental genetics for reproductive success of plants, although its genetic control in common bean remains fragmentary compared to other crops.
The general objective of BeanGrowth is to understand the role of the genes and genetic networks that dictate meristem maturation in common bean which allow re-balancing vegetative to reproductive growth to customize plant architecture for improved crop productivity to specific target environments. Precise genetic common bean materials (EMS-induced mutant collection and mapping populations) and broad germplasm diversity panels varying in inflorescence architecture will be used to test this hypothesis. These will be studied at the molecular (genomic analysis), morphological (meristem stage dissection) and agronomical (flowering and plant architecture components) levels. The phenotypic and genetic variation in meristem transitions will be analyzed across mutants altered in the inflorescence development, and the genes responsible for two of them will be cloned. Functional validation of the candidate gene for the trait is one of the priorities of this project. The project will describe useful variation from an agronomic point of view (see Figure).
BeanGrowth project will bring together an interdisciplinary team with the collaboration of research groups (University of Granada-UGR, University of Almería-UAL, the Institute of Molecular Biology of Plants -IBMCP) and companies (including EPOs with a direct interest in the project’s protectable solutions and possibilities of exploitation). To the end, knowledge will be used to design new bean crops, and in consequence, a differentiation by quality of the final product, which will translate into an increase in added value, and to the end provide to the agro-food sector with solutions to adapt to the new context. Novel genetic variation and new diagnostic biotechnological markers will be useful for breeding selection programs and SMEs who will exploit the tools developed.

Figure. Description objetives of BeanGrowth.