Perhaps you missed the news that the price of hummus has spiked in Great Britain. The cause, as the New York Times reported on February 8: drought in India, resulting in a poor harvest of chickpeas. Far beyond making dips for pita bread, chickpeas are a legume of life-and-death importance—especially in India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia where 1 in 5 of the world’s people depend on them as their primary source of protein.
Perhaps you missed the news that the price of hummus has spiked in Great Britain. The cause, as the New York Times reported on February 8: drought in India, resulting in a poor harvest of chickpeas. Far beyond making dips for pita bread, chickpeas are a legume of life-and-death importance—especially in India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia where 1 in 5 of the world’s people depend on them as their primary source of protein.
As global climate change continues, scientists expect more droughts, heat stress and insect pests—creating need for new varieties of agricultural plants with diverse qualities that will let them cope and adapt to quickly changing conditions. Where could those novel traits come from?
“The wild relatives of crop plants are the most promising reserves of genetic diversity,” say Eric Bishop von Wettberg, a plant biologist at the University of Vermont. He led a new research effort that took a deep look at the ecology and genetics of chickpea plants. The scientists discovered an extreme lack of genetic diversity and other threats to the future adaptability of domestic chickpeas. But they also collected wild relatives of chickpeas in southeastern Turkey that hold “great promise,” von Wettberg says, as a source of new genes for traits like drought-resistance, resistance to pod-boring beetles, and heat tolerance.
Continue reading at University of Vermont.
Image via University of Vermont.
