Coinciding with the International Year of Pulses, a team of researchers from Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Spain, at the initiative of the Ibero-American Program of Science and Technology for Development, has managed to decipher the genome of the common bean ( Phaseolus vulgaris ). The study has been published in the journal Genome Biology.
The cultivation of beans is ancestral (they have been cultivated for thousands of years in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Europe, the United States and Canada) and represents half of all the legumes consumed worldwide. Taking into account that legumes are consumed regularly by more than 500 million people , this finding represents a great advance as it is such a relevant seed in our diet.
The scientists sequenced and assembled the 620 million base pairs that make up the common bean genome; that is, they were able to read and order what would be equivalent to the “letters” of the genome, finally identifying a total of 30,491 genes . They also analyzed genomic expression patterns.
“The genome sequence of the bean, both of the Andean variety, which was sequenced previously, and of the Mesoamerican variety, will definitely contribute to the identification of genes involved in disease resistance , drought and salt tolerance, nitrogen fixation, the formation of reproductive cells and seed quality, among other improvements ”, explains Roderic Guigó, leader of the work.
This discovery will make it possible to improve crops both in terms of their nutritional quality or their resistance to water and in the advancement of biotechnological research within agriculture.
