Executive Summary : | Micronutrient deficiency is a serious threat affecting more than one-fourth of the global population (Gonmei and Toteja, 2018). According to the Food and Agriculture Organization report, it is estimated that ~191 million (15%) people were undernourished in India during 2014–2016. For enhancing dietary nutrition, green cotyledon legumes could be a promising inclusion. These legumes contain elevated levels of beta-carotene (precursor for provitamin-A; Sivasakthi et al., 2019). Legumes such as Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata [L.] Walp), Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), and Lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.) are already a part of the regular diet of millions of people in semi-arid and tropical regions (Singh and Singh, 1992). Frequent drought and heat stress occurrence during cropping seasons is typical in semi-arid and tropical regions that affect crop yield (Berger et al., 2006). High carotenoid content was reported to involve abiotic stress adaptation (Zhang et al., 2021). In green cotyledon legumes, there is a natural mutation in the stay-green gene (SGR) associated with degradation of chlorophyll resulting in delayed senescence of leaves, stem, and cotyledon. Recent work at ICRISAT showed that green-cotyledon chickpea CaStGR1 variants contain multiple-fold higher levels of beta-carotene compared to the yellow cotyledon seeded CaStGR1 without a trade-off in agronomic traits (Sivasakthi et al., 2019). Therefore, we hypothesize the green cotyledon trait in legumes may have a link with abiotic stress adaptation. In addition, we propose to evaluate the nutritional content in multiple legumes with green cotyledons (cowpea, common bean, and lima bean) in continuation of the baseline work done at ICRISAT. To assess the abiotic stress adaptation of green cotyledon legumes, a high throughput phenotyping facility (HT) - Lysimetric system will be used which facilitates the evaluation of crop water use as well its yield. Then, the impact of drought and heat stress on total carotenoid content in grains will be assessed using a spectrophotometer. From the total carotenoid, beta-carotene content will be extracted, separated and quantified as it is the precursor for provitamin-A through High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). As this interdisciplinary work aids in identifying the heat and drought stress adapted green-seeded legume genotypes with better nutrition the work proposed would be highly beneficial as we could introgress the nutrient-dense green cotyledon trait into farmer-preferred varieties of different legume crops. |