Revisiting the Domestication Process of African Vigna Species (Fabaceae): Background, Perspectives and Challenges.

Davide Panzeri,Massimo Labra,Fabrizio Grassi,Werther Guidi Nissim

doi:10.3390/plants11040532

Davide Panzeri, Massimo Labra + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/plants11040532

Copy DOI

Abstract

Legumes are one of the most economically important and biodiverse families in plants recognised as the basis to develop functional foods. Among these, the Vigna genus stands out as a good representative because of its relatively recent African origin as well as its outstanding potential. Africa is a great biodiversity centre in which a great number of species are spread, but only three of them, Vigna unguiculata, Vigna subterranea and Vigna vexillata, were successfully domesticated. This review aims at analysing and valorising these species by considering the perspective of human activity and what effects it exerts. For each species, we revised the origin history and gave a focus on where, when and how many times domestication occurred. We provided a brief summary of bioactive compounds naturally occurring in these species that are fundamental for human wellbeing. The great number of wild lineages is a key point to improve landraces since the domestication process caused a loss of gene diversity. Their genomes hide a precious gene pool yet mostly unexplored, and genes lost during human activity can be recovered from the wild lineages and reintroduced in cultivated forms through modern technologies. Finally, we describe how all this information is game-changing to the design of future crops by domesticating de novo.

Highlights

Legumes (Fabaceae) are considered one of the most important families of plants for human nutrition, especially considering the rapid growth rate of the world population [1].almost all the efforts and resources invested in agriculture during the last century were focused on improving the yield, resistance and quality of a few specific staple crops.Neglected landraces are regarded as having interesting potential, and recent studies have demonstrated that some wild legumes can be an important target to develop modern functional foods because they possess various bioactive molecules that interact positively with human health [2,3,4,5]
The research could start from accessions already studied and kept in germplasm banks, with the aim of breeding the most promising ones with domesticated landraces to create variants that are, at the same time, easy to cultivate but with the most interesting characteristics found from the available natural pool
Since ancestral sequence reconstruction (ASR) can be used to explore the remote evolutionary past as well as to investigate molecular evolution on shorter timescales, we argue that the proteins expressed in different genera of legumes are well suited for ancestral reconstruction studies

Summary

Introduction

Legumes (Fabaceae) are considered one of the most important families of plants for human nutrition, especially considering the rapid growth rate of the world population [1]. Cowpea from West Africa showed a high genetic variability [88], cultivated accessions grown in East and West Africa were shown to be most closely related to the respective local wild lineages [52,89], thereby indicating that domestication could have occurred in both regions. Since some accessions were found to be resistant to different viral diseases and parasite insects, widely recognized as major pests of cowpea, this species is an important harbour of resistances to various biotic stresses, useful to improve modern Vigna crops [129,130,131,132,133,134]

Healthy Natural Compounds for Designing Sustainable Crops

Antioxidant and Anti-Inflammatory Activity

Anti-Tumor Compounds

Anti Hypercholesterolemic

Introgression and Feralisation Processes

Domestication-Related Traits and De Novo Domestication