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Cicer

Due to its unique evolutionary history and narrow geographical range (found mostly around the Middle East region), the only known domesticated chickpea, Cicer arietinum, suffers from adaptive limitations. This comes from an assumption that the wild progenitor can only offer very limited adaptive allelic variation for improving the chickpea crop.

Currently, the only domesticated species of the Cicer genus is Cicer arietinum, commonly known as the chickpea. The chickpea is a staple food source that is used in a large number of Middle eastern households and is becoming increasingly more common among households around the world. In the coming years, it will become more difficult to feed the growing population of the world, and in anticipation of this crisis, many researchers are trying to find new sources of food from undomesticated species of plants. The hope is that through research, domestication, and crop improvement, plants that were previously inedible can become a major source of food.

The wild progenitor of the chickpea (Cicer arietinum) is Cicer reticulatum. Since the chickpea has descended from this wild plant, there is a possibility that this wild progenitor can offer other forms of edible chickpeas after domestication. In wild chickpea (Cicer reticulatum), a considerable proportion of the mature pods remain intact, and this characteristic leads to the species being described as preadapted to domestication. This essentially means that the function of one of its traits can change, or evolve, as the progenitor is domesticated. This implies that traits such as texture, size, and most importantly, nutritional content can be adjusted in this species. Domesticated chickpea is considered vernalization insensitive (it can flower at all times of the year), whereas wild Cicer reticulatum shows a considerable flowering advance (of up to 30 days) in response to vernalization—which means that the plant would have to grow in areas where it is exposed to a prolonged period of cold before it can properly grow.

Although there is promise for some kind of domestication process to allow for and create new sources of food through Cicer reticulatum, there are several issues that make domestication of this wild species quite difficult. The first of these problems is that Cicer reticulatum may offer only limited adaptive allelic variation for improving the chickpea crop. Also, the narrow range of the Cicer reticulatum suggests that the prospects for improving the adaptive range of domesticated chickpea are quite limited. The patchy distribution of the wild plant, the small number of seeds produced per plant, and the relatively low allelic variation within populations (of the wild progenitor) makes germplasm conservation ( conservation of seeds or tissues, otherwise known as the living genetic resources of plants) a bit difficult.

When tried in the past, chickpea breeding has faced problems because of the lack of genetic diversity. This has caused limitations in efforts to improve resistance to diseases such as Ascochyta blight and Fusarium wilt. There have also been problems such as insects susceptible to breaking through the chickpea pods and limitations in increasing tolerance to abiotic stresses such as terminal drought and extreme temperatures. To fix these limitations, the introduction of alleles controlling the traits of interest from wild germplasm is essential in order to increase the genetic diversity of cultivated chickpeas. Currently, the chickpea’s immediate ancestor, Cicer reticulatum, and its interfertile sister species Cicer echinospermum, are the main sources of new variation. Introgression is still possible from the more distantly related gene pools, but more research has to be done on this possibility. But the narrow variation of the wild progenitor (Cicer reticulatum) of the chickpea and the limited number of Cicer reticulatum accessions have caused a need to look for desired alleles in other more distantly related Cicer species