Lens

Abstract

Exploitation of the wild gene pool for the improvement of many cultivated crops through breeding has helped modern agriculture for decades. Wild relatives have earned great focus in crop research for their better tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses. Research has focused on screening wild sources and exploiting them by introgressing useful variation into their cultivated counterparts. Lentil (Lens culinaris ssp. culinaris) is an important edible legume with a wide gene pool scattered among its cultivated and wild relatives for higher productivity, better disease resistance, and tolerance to environmental stresses. Like other pulses, lentil needs substantial improvement for higher economic returns by utilizing its potential wild relatives. Hence, this chapter summarizes the pertinent information on wild relatives of lentil, covering their distribution, botany, taxonomy, conservation, genetics, and variability studies for different agromorphological traits and biotic and abiotic stresses. This chapter also explains the crossability status of different Lens subspecies and species along with the conventional and non-conventional breeding approaches used so far for widening the gene pool of cultivated lentil.