Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), commonly called gram, Bengal gram, or garbanzo bean, is the most important food grain legume of South Asia and the third most important in the world after common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) and field pea (Pisum sativum L.). Chickpea is a diploid with 2n=2x=l6 chromosomes and a genome size of approximately 750 Mbp (Arumuganathan and Earle, 1991). Chickpea is one of the first grain crops cultivated by man and has been uncovered in Middle Eastern archaeological sites dated to the eighth millennium BC (Zohary and Hopf, 2000). Two distinct market type classes, desi and kabuli, are recognized in chickpea (Pundir, Rao, and van der Maesen, 1985). The desi types that account for about 85% of chickpea area usually have small, angularshaped, dark-colored seeds with a rough surface, pink flowers, anthocyanin pigmentation on the stems, and either semi-erect or semi-spreading growth habit. The kabuli type, which cover the remaining 15% area, usually have large “rams head”-shaped smooth surface seeds, lack of anthocyanin pigmentation, and semi-spreading growth habit. It has become increasingly clear during the last few decades that meeting the food needs of the world’s growing population depends, to a large extent, on the conservation and use of the world’s remaining plant genetic resources. Conservation without use has little point and use will not come without evaluation. Genetic resources encompass all forms of the cultivated species, as well as their related wild species (Harlan, 1984). That is a general concept to which chickpea is no exception. In reviewing genetic resources and their multifaceted applications in chickpea genetic improvement, we have placed more emphasis on the wild genetic resources of the cultivated chickpea, while providing a brief overview of resources available in the cultivated species.