Use of wild relatives in pea breeding for disease resistance

Trabajo presentado en el Second International Legume Society Conference "Legumes for a sustainable world" (ILS2), celebrado en Tróia (Portugal) del 11 al 14 de octubre de 2016.Pea (Pisum sativum ssp. sativum ) is a cool season legume crop produced worldwide, mainly in temperate regions whose seeds can be used to feed livestock or for human food. Pea yield can be constrained by a number of pests and diseases to which there is insufficient genetic resistance available. Wild relatives, including related subspecies of P. sativum, or even the most distant P. fulvum offers a reservoir of sources of resistance that can be exploited in pea breeding. At CSIC at Córdoba we have screened large germplasm collections of Pisum looking for resistance to ascochyta blight, powdery mildew, rust, broomrape, fusarium wilt, aphid and weevil. This resulted in the identification of valuable sources of resistance that were introduced in our breeding program. As an example, a new gene (Er3) for powdery mildew resistance was identified in P. fulvum and introduced in pea, with a resistant cultivar (‘Eritreo’) already protected in European catalogue. Similarly, the first two broomrape resistant cultivars are now protected, and a number of breeding lines are being developed. Parallel to this applied approach, some of the identified resistances have been characterized at the histochemist, genetic and proteomic level.N