Under the reign of the pea king (Pisum sativum L.): The difficult fate of the first genetical object

Abstract

The pea (Pisum sativum L.) is an important grain, vegetable, and forage crop, capable of improving soils via symbyotic nitrogen fixation. It is very important for Russia as a crop adapted to high latitudes and a cheap source of plant protein. At the same time, the pea is the first genetical object as used in G. Mendel’s famous experiments. The first translocation in the history of genetics was also found in pea. The pea’s generation time may be shortened to 35 days, which is comparable to Arabidopsis. Small and scarcely recognisable chromosomes hampered the development of cytogenetics in pea, while the recombination genetic maps remained inadequate until the 1990s and were improved only with the aid of molecular methods. To date, in the pea, two different numeration systems coexist for the linkage groups and the chromosomes as cytological objects. Recently the whole range of modern molecular methods markers of genetic analysis was applied to the pea, including isozymes; RAPD-, SSR-, RFLP-, AFLP-, STS-, CAPS-, sCAPS-, and SNP-markers; and also the methods of reverse genetics, including TILLING and virus-induced genomic silencing. Application of association mapping is expected to be applied. Several transcriptome studies were carried out on the pea. At the same time, the complete nuclear genome of the pea has not been sequenced but is expected to be sequenced in 2016. The synteny of the pea’s genome to the sequenced genome of Medicago truncatula is actively used to work out new molecular markers in the pea. Genetic transformation is very difficult in the pea. The pea was used as an experimental model for investigating the following fundamental issues: genetic control of symbiosis with nitrogen fixing bacteria, influence of variation in the histone H1 gene on the phenotype, the mechanism of the nuclear-cytoplasmic conflict in remote crosses, the origin of B-chromosomes in plants, and the genetic control of the compound leaf morphology.