Map also facilitates genetic improvement of several other legumesCowpea, a protein-rich legume crop, is immensely important in many parts of the world, particularly drought-prone regions of Africa and Asia, where it plays a central role in the diet and economy of hundreds of millions of people.Cowpea provides food that complements starchy staple crops such as corn, cassava, sorghum and millets to offer a well-rounded diet, much as beans and other grain legumes complement maize- and rice-based diets in Latin America and other places. Due to its hardy nature, cowpea plays a key role in sustaining food security for both people and their livestock.But breeding new cowpea varieties with desirable traits, such as disease resistance, pest resistance and drought tolerance, is a time-consuming and laborious process that can take a decade from concept to release.A challenge facing cowpea breeders, therefore, is how to accelerate the production of new and improved cowpea varieties in order to both meet the needs of a growing world population and provide the productivity gains needed by farmers to improve their economic standing.Now a team of scientists at the University of California, Riverside has responded to this challenge by developing a high-density "consensus genetic map" of cowpea that accelerates conventional breeding severalfold and facilitates the production of new varieties of not only cowpea but also other legumes, particularly soybean and common bean (near relatives of cowpea). To build the map, the scientists first modified and then applied advanced genetic tools developed from human genome investigations that only recently have been applied to a few major crop plants."The consensus map is a consolidation of six individual genetic maps of cowpea, and is far more representative of the cowpea genome than earlier maps," said team leader, Timothy Close, a professor of genetics in the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences. "We now have a reliable, powerful too ...

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