| Abstract | Legumes (Fabaceae, formerly Leguminosae) are a diverse, widely dis-tributed, and economically important family of annual or perennialherbaceous plants, xerophytes, and forest trees. As a steady source ofproteins, vitamins, minerals, and either lipids or starch, as well as theirability to fix nitrogen, legume grains play a major role in advancinghealth and nutrition, food security, and environmental sustainability,also providing forage for livestock and serving as cover crops to con-trol weeds and erosion. The production potential of legume crops isconstrained by several abiotic and biotic stress factors. Deploymentof molecular breeding approaches for legume improvement hasgenerally lagged behind the more successful cereal and oilseed crops.However, with the recent advances in next generation sequencingand genotyping technologies, legume genomics is advancing quiterapidly. Over the past decade, reference genome sequenceshave become available for more than 45 legume species (NCBIGenome Database; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/browse/#!/overview/Fabaceae). The application of DNA and RNA sequencingis providing considerable insights into the hidden genetic, epigeneticand structural variation underlying various complex traits for legumeimprovement. This special Issue on legume genomics, comprising ninereviews, four original research articles and a resource article,addresses some of the most important advances and applications inthe field. |
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