A Tool Kit to Help Scientists Find the Ultimate Chickpea
The New York Times
A major plant genome sequencing effort may offer a path to breeding more climate-resilient chickpeas, while also revealing clues to the legume’s origins.
When you open a can of chickpeas and fish out the nutty, savory little beans, you’re partaking in a history that began around 10,000 years ago. The modern chickpea’s ancestor, a wild Middle Eastern plant that likely had tiny, hard seeds, was cultivated by humans around the same time as wheat and barley, and began to evolve as early farmers selected plants whose seeds were larger and more succulent. Archaeologists have even found what appear to be domesticated chickpeas buried beneath Jericho in the West Bank, so deep that they would have been grown even before the inhabitants of one of history’s longest occupied cities began to make pottery.
The humble chickpea has had a somewhat rocky road to its present popularity, however, suggests a new study published last week in Nature that sequences the genomes of more than 3,000 examples, making it one of the largest plant genome sequencing efforts ever completed.
“I’m truly excited to see what else will be uncovered from this massive resource,” said Patrick Edger, a professor of horticulture at Michigan State University who was not involved in the study.
