Grain and forage legumes: Nutritional value and agriculture sustainability

Abstract

Humanity faces great challenges with respect to the use of energy, the production of food and feed, and the management of the Earth through sustainable practices. Agriculture can play a key role to give appropriate responses to these challenges. By the end of this century, human population will grow up to around 10,000 million people, meaning we must be able to produce food and feed for more than an additional number of 3300 million people. Legumes together with cereals have been combined to produce healthy food along the history of agriculture in all geographical areas of the planet. However, recently, the use of legumes, mainly in the developed countries, has been neglected therefore compromising human health and sustainable production of food and feed. Agronomy has always been driven by technology and innovation. The development of genomic tools in legume model systems such as Medicago truncatula will allow to make progress into the knowledge of critical processes of legumes biology such as nitrogen fixation, including the mechanisms controlling nodulation through soil nitrogen sensing, drought and flooding tolerances or the understanding of key factors governing the vegetative development of legumes, the control of inflorescences architecture or floral transition, and fruit set and seed development and composition. Traditional breeding combined with genome editing techniques will drive the production of grain and forage legume varieties for the future.