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When you open a can of chickpeas and pop out the nutty, salty little beans, you’re part of a history that began nearly 10,000 years ago. The ancestor of the modern chickpea, probably a wild Middle Eastern plant with small, firm seeds, was cultivated by humans at the same time as wheat and barley and began to evolve as early farmers chose plants whose seeds were larger and more succulent. Even archaeologists found What looks like domesticated chickpeas buried under Jericho It was so deep in the West Bank that it would have grown large even before the inhabitants of one of the longest occupied cities in history started making pottery.
The humble chickpea has taken a somewhat bumpy road to its current popularity. New study published last week in Nature It has sequenced the genomes of more than 3,000 specimens, making it one of the largest plant genome sequencing efforts ever completed.
“I’m really excited to see what else comes out of this huge resource,” said Patrick Edger, professor of horticulture at Michigan State University, who was not involved in the study.
Researchers now believe that their cultivation may have stalled for millennia after chickpeas were first domesticated in Turkey’s Southeast Anatolian region. The result was a genetic bottleneck that made all chickpeas today descendants of a relatively small group from millennia ago. What’s more, modern cultivars grown by most farmers have low genetic diversity, meaning they are at risk of failing under the stress of climate change. By mapping the genetic makeup of legumes in such rich detail, scientists hope to make it easier for plant breeders developing new crop types to bring diversity back into the chickpea’s genes and give it a handful of droughts, floods, and diseases.
While hummus can only be found ubiquitously in US grocery stores last 15 yearsChickpeas have long been a staple in the developing world, said Rajeev Varshney, research program director at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics in Hyderabad, India, and also a professor at Murdoch University in Australia. author of the new article.
India is the world’s largest chickpea producer, Over 10 million metric tons of growth in 2019, also one of the largest importers.
But the status of chickpeas as a developing world crop meant they didn’t receive as much attention from growers as commodities like maize, Dr. Varshney. Chickpea farmers are growing a handful of varieties that have improved over the years without the benefit of genetic information that could give growers more control over what traits the beans will have.
In this study, the researchers sequenced the DNA of 3,366 chickpea samples from wild relatives of the crop to modern stock. In addition to a number of genes common to plants, they identified a wide variety of genes, including some that scientists hadn’t discovered before. While these common genes could possibly handle core traits that all plants share, unique genes might encode special abilities such as drought tolerance and disease protection. Going further, the researchers pinpointed groups of genes, some of which are found in ancient varieties, that could help modern chickpeas.
Dr. Varshney said that the way plant breeding usually works is that when a genetic trait, such as resistance to a fungal disease, is introduced into a particular variety, all individuals will have exactly the same means of preventing infection. This means that if a type of disease develops that can get past this defense, the consequences can be disastrous.
Dr. “The whole crop – the whole field – will be wiped out,” Varshney said.
He hopes that using the gene sets identified in this study and making sure that many different sets are represented in chickpea populations may be a protection against crop failures. And he said growing more resilient chickpeas is a process that must begin now, using genetic information to speed up the process: If farmers one day wake up and find that they need a chickpea that can thrive at 104 degrees Fahrenheit, “it would be very challenging. It has to be incremental,” Varshney said. “
The study also explores what the chickpea’s genes can tell us about their travels. Beans traveled along independent routes from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent and the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. And although patterns in its genes have shown a gradual decline in popularity over thousands of years, scientists aren’t sure why this might be.
Dr. “Maybe the farmers thought it wasn’t helpful,” Varshney said.
That changed about 400 years ago, when people rediscovered the wonders of chickpeas for reasons the researchers couldn’t explain, according to the data. The next time you dip pita in hummus, you may be glad you did.
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