The Project’s chickpea (Cicer arietinum) pre-breeding work is being coordinated by a diverse team of members including scientists at the University of California, Davis, and Florida International University in the United States; Dicle University, Harran University and the Aegean Agricultural Research Institute in Turkey; and the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Morocco. The chickpea pre-breeding work is expected to take place between 2014 and 2017.
The primary goal of the chickpea pre-breeding work is to phenotype a representative set of collections of the two wild progenitor species of cultivated chickpea, Cicer reticulatum and Cicer echinospermum, with the objective of evaluating the wild chickpea germplasm for drought tolerance. The phenotyping efforts will involve 36 genotypes from 9 genetically defined populations, and the analysis will work to discover transpiration-related phenotypes that help to conserve soil moisture (and thus are likely to confer drought tolerance).
This project is expected to identify genes contributing to abiotic stress tolerance and help facilitate their introgression into cultivated chickpea lines over the long-term, for example through a related USAID project to develop and deploy climate resilient crop varieties, particularly in Ethiopia.
