Recent advances in molecular breeding and key insights into major pulse improvement efforts for sustainable food security

Pulses are important crops for global food security and are highly adaptable to diverse environmental conditions. Despite these merits, pulses often face neglect and undervaluation in production. Conventional breeding has been successful for centuries in improving various traits, based on their superior agronomic performance. However, this is a phenotype-based selection that is laborious, expensive, inefficient, error-prone, and often poorly adaptive. To address these challenges, molecular breeding has emerged as a valuable approach, bridging the gap between phenotype and genotype.

Consequently, we aimed to review recent advances in molecular breeding for major pulse crops, and the introgression of novel genes providing a comprehensive overview of breeding strategies for sustainable food security, particularly in developing countries. Genetic improvement through molecular breeding tools has been used to reliably improve pulse nutritional quality traits (such as taste, aroma, protein digestibility, essential amino acid profile, and the absence of anti-nutritional factors) and resistance to environmental stresses. Accordingly, the integration of next-generation genome sequencing, genome-wide association studies, high-throughput phenotyping, and omics research approaches are accelerating the discovery of the genetic loci underlying these traits and improving pulse research, mainly for key pulses like soybean, chickpea, broad bean, common bean, field pea, grass pea, cowpea, mung bean, and lentil. In general, molecular interventions in pulse breeding hold great promise for improving food and nutrition security, particularly in developing countries.