Genetic Engineering for Enhancing Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Pulses

Abstract

Pulses are climate-smart grain legumes important to nutritional security and sustainable agriculture. Abiotic stresses take a heavy toll in pulse production, and genetic engineering offers a solution to add adaptive traits in the germplasm. Abiotic stresses being mostly polygenic are difficult to manipulate and require a thorough understanding of the underlying mechanism. Impact of abiotic stresses in eight different pulses, genetic mechanism involved, and transgenics approach adopted for enhancing the stress tolerance in those pulses are discussed. Traits engineered in chickpea (drought and salt tolerance), pigeon pea (salt tolerance), mung bean (salt and cold tolerance), urdbean (salt and drought tolerance and aluminum toxicity), cowpea (salt tolerance), field pea (salt, frost, and heat tolerance), common bean (drought tolerance), and lentil (cold and freezing tolerance) and resulting phenotypes are also discussed. Currently, only two transgenic pulses for biotic stress (insect resistance for cowpea and golden mosaic virus in common bean) are commercialized. Climate change poses various challenges, and genetic engineering and emerging genome editing techniques for abiotic stress-adaptive traits shall play a crucial role in abiotic stress management.