Marker-Assisted Breeding in Legumes for Drought Tolerance

This contributed volume highlights cutting-edge breeding techniques in legumes, specifically targeting drought tolerance. It examines the challenges faced and explores future perspectives for achieving sustainable legume production.

The dual challenges of a rapidly growing global population and climate change impose immense pressure on agricultural systems to meet current and future food demands. Climate change significantly threatens agriculture, causing substantial yield losses due to biotic and abiotic stresses, with drought being one of the most severe environmental factors impacting plant productivity. Water, which constitutes approximately 80-95% of the fresh biomass of plants, is vital for various physiological processes, including plant growth, development, and metabolism.

Legumes, second only to cereals in global food production, account for 27% of world primary crop production and fulfill 33% of protein requirements. Cultivated across diverse climates and soil types, legumes contribute to over 35% of global vegetable oil production. However, drought remains a major yield-limiting factor in grain legumes, a challenge expected to intensify in the future. Drought adversely affects legumes at all growth stages, disrupting germination (through malfunctioning enzymes like proteases and amylases), nutrient uptake (due to reduced water use efficiency), growth (by inhibiting cell division and leaf expansion), and yield formation (by restricting photosynthesis).

Given these challenges, the scientific community is focusing on developing drought-resistant legume cultivars to ensure future food security. This volume consolidates research efforts on advancing drought-tolerant legumes using marker-assisted breeding techniques.

This book will serve as a valuable resource for students, researchers, and breeding professionals engaged in legume breeding for drought tolerance. By fostering advancements in sustainable agriculture, this volume aims to contribute to global food security and empower stakeholders in addressing climate change-induced agricultural challenges.

Muhammad Azhar Nadeem is working as an Associate Professor of plant breeding and genetics at Mersin University Mersin, Turkiye. He is currently engaged in research activities involving genetic diversity assessment and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) to identify genomic regions and validate them for marker-assisted breeding. Dr. Nadeem is focusing on performing GWAS in legumes, especially in common bean, lentil, and other legumes to identify genomic regions associated with agronomic, mineral elements, cooking, and quality traits. He has more than 75 SCI/SCIE publications in world-renowned and prestigious journals and also published more than 10 book chapters on important aspects of molecular genetics about plant species. He serves as an editorial board member of several international journals. Dr. Nadeem is an active member of various COST actions as well. Dr. Nadeem served as editor and co-editor of four other books. He has a good number of citations (over 3000) as per Google Scholar with an h-Index of 25.

Faheem Shehzad Baloch is working as a professor of plant genetics and breeding at Mersin University, Turkey. He has more than 11 years of teaching and research experience in plant phenomics, genetics and genomics, and biotechnology. He led and participated in many projects funded by national and international organizations. He supervised and co-supervised MSC, PhD, and postdoc candidates from various countries. He is serving as a Management Committee and active member of various COST actions and played important roles in different work packages of various COST actions. He has more than 120 SCI publications in WOS and edited 9 books and written over 19 book chapters on important aspects of molecular genetics in relation to plant species. He has an extensive array of citations with over 4300 times as per Google Scholar with an h-Index of 35. He serves as an Editorial board member of several impacted journals.

Filippos Bantis is an Assistant Professor at the Vegetable and Greenhouse Crops, School of Agriculture, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, 53100, Greece. Dr. Bantis has undertaken as Principal Investigator 2 research projects funded by individual companies and has also participated or is participating in 12 European and national research projects as well as in 4 joint action projects (COST Actions). He is involved in a patent entitled "Method for the production of improved grafted watermelon seedlings using artificial lighting". He has 33 publications in peer-reviewed international journals and there are 547 citations in his published work. He has also 19 presentations at international and 11 presentations at national conferences, is a member of the editorial board of two international journals, and is a guest editor for 2 special issues in an international journal.

Sajid Fiaz is an Assistant Professor working at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, The University of Lahore, Pakistan. Dr. Fiaz is also serving as adjunct scholar at Henan Institute of Science and Technology, China. Dr. Fiaz’s research interests include marker-assisted selection for agronomic traits, mutation breeding for biotic and abiotic stress resistance, Quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping and genome editing for yield and quality traits in cereals. Dr. Fiaz is actively supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students. He has published more than 162 research, 10 review articles, and 12 book chapters with various prestigious international scientific journals. He is working as academic editor with several high-notch scientific magazines.

Muhammad Aasim is a Professor at the Department of Plant Protection, Sivas University of Science and Technology, Sivas, Turkey since 2020. He completed his graduation and masters from Pakistan with honors and received gold medal from BZU, Multan (gradua­tion), and silver medal from UAF (Master). He worked in multinational pesticide companies from 1998 to 2003 in Pakistan. He started his PhD in 2004 and was awarded PhD in 2010 from Ankara University with honor. After completing PhD, he worked as Asst. Prof. from 2011 to 2013 and Assoc. Prof. from 2013 to 2015 at the Department of Biology, Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, Karaman, Türkiye. He also served at the Department of Biotechnology, Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, Türkiye as Assoc. Prof. from 2016 to 2020. He is currently engaged in research activities involving plant biotechnology, plant tissue culture, genetic transformation, phytoremediation, stress physi­ology, plant-based biopesticides, medicinal and aquatic plants, and nanoparticles. He is also working as an active consultant for plant tissue culture labs. He has published 95 SCIE articles, and cumulatively more than 100 International research articles. He is co-editor of 1 book and wrote more than 30 international book chap­ters since 2018. Currently, he is working on application of artificial intelligence (AI) in plant biotechnology and plant sciences and published research articles in world-renowned journals in 2022 and 2023. Currently, his h-index is 24 with more than 1690 citations on Google Scholar.