Agro-Morphological Exploration of Some Unexplored Wild Vigna Legumes for Domestication

Difo Voukang Harouna,Patrick Alois Ndakidemi,Athanasia O Matemu,Pavithravani B Venkataramana

doi:10.3390/agronomy10010111

Difo Voukang Harouna, Patrick Alois Ndakidemi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy10010111

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Abstract

The domestication of novel or hitherto wild food crops is quickly becoming one of the most popular approaches in tackling the challenges associated with sustainable food crop production, especially in this era, where producing more food with fewer resources is the need of the hour. The crop breeding community is not yet completely unanimous regarding the importance of crop neo-domestication. However, exploring the unexplored, refining unrefined traits, cultivating the uncultivated, and popularizing the unpopular remain the most adequate steps proposed by most researchers to achieve the domestication of the undomesticated for food and nutrition security. Therefore, in the same line of thought, this paper explores the agro-morphological characteristics of some wild Vigna legumes from an inquisitive perspective to contribute to their domestication. One hundred and sixty accessions of wild Vigna legumes, obtained from gene banks, were planted, following the augmented block design layout of two agro-ecological zones of Tanzania, during the 2018 and 2019 main cropping seasons for agro-morphological investigations. The generalized linear model procedure (GLM PROC), two-way analysis of variance (two-way ANOVA), agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) and principal component analysis (PCA) were used to analyze the accession, block and block vs. accession effects, as well as the accession × site and accession × season interaction grouping variations among accessions. The results showed that the wild species (Vigna racemosa; Vigna ambacensis; Vigna reticulata; and Vigna vexillata) present a considerable variety of qualitative traits that singularly exist in the three studied checks (cowpea, rice bean, and a landrace of Vigna vexillata). Of the 15 examined quantitative traits, only the days to flowering, pods per plant, hundred seed weight and yield were affected by the growing environment (accession × site effect), while only the number of flowers per raceme and the pods per plant were affected by the cropping season (accession × season effect). All the quantitative traits showed significant differences among accessions for each site and each season. The same result was observed among the checks, except for the seed size trait. The study finally revealed three groups, in a cluster analysis and 59.61% of the best variations among the traits and accessions in PCA. Indications as to the candidate accessions favorable for domestication were also revealed. Such key preliminary information could be of the utmost importance for the domestication, breeding, and improvement of these species, since it also determines their future existence—that is, so long as biodiversity conservation continues to be a challenging concern for humanity.

Highlights

It has been reported that only 12 crops contribute most to the current global food production, with only three of them providing more than 50% of the world’s calories [1,2,3].the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations has predicted that the world is in need of about 70% more food to adequately feed the ever-growing population [4].a detailed screening and exploration of hitherto wild and novel species from various agro-climatic regions of the world could help to mitigate the need
The results showed that the wild species (Vigna racemosa; Vigna ambacensis; Vigna reticulata; and Vigna vexillata) present a considerable variety of qualitative traits that singularly exist in the three studied checks
Of the 15 examined quantitative traits, only the days to flowering, pods per plant, hundred seed weight and yield were affected by the growing environment, while only the number of flowers per raceme and the pods per plant were affected by the cropping season

Summary

Introduction

It has been reported that only 12 crops contribute most to the current global food production, with only three of them (rice, wheat and maize) providing more than 50% of the world’s calories [1,2,3]. A detailed screening and exploration of hitherto wild and novel species from various agro-climatic regions of the world could help to mitigate the need. The crop breeding community is not yet unanimous on the importance of the crop neo-domestication concept, it is increasingly becoming popular in research on this topic that domesticating the undomesticated is an ideal method, which could aid in mitigating the global food insecurity challenges [1,5]. The method will promote the successful utilization of hitherto wild and non-domesticated food crops in dietary diversification programs, and help with biodiversity conservation.

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