Achievements and Challenges in Legume Breeding for Pest and Disease Resistance

Yield stability of legume crops is constrained by a number of pest and diseases. Major diseases are rusts, powdery and downy mildews, ascochyta blights, botrytis gray molds, anthracnoses, damping-off, root rots, collar rots, vascular wilts and white molds. Parasitic weeds, viruses, bacteria, nematodes and damages caused by chewing and sap-sucking insects add to this long list of constraints for legume production. Their incidence and relative importance together with current understanding of their interactions with the host plants are presented. State of the art of current achievements and limitations for breeding for biotic stress resistance are listed and critically discussed. The recent development of large scale phenotyping, genome sequencing and analysis of gene, protein and metabolite expressions can be of great help to further decipher plant-pathogen interactions and identify key resistance components that may be introgressed into crop plants through breeding.