Legume Biology: Sequence to Seeds

Water binding in legume seeds.

The physical status of water in seeds has a pivotal role in determining the physiological reactions that can take place in the dry state. Using water sorption isotherms from cotyledon and axis tissue of five leguminous seeds, the strength of water binding and the numbers of binding sites have been estimated using van't Hoff analyses and the D'Arcy/Watt equation. These parameters of water sorp...

Legume biology: the basis for crop improvement

Legumes represent the most valued food sources in agriculture after cereals. Despite the advances made in breeding food legumes, there is a need to develop and further improve legume productivity to meet increasing food demand worldwide. Several biotic and abiotic stresses affect legume crop productivity throughout the world. The study of legume genetics, genomics andbiology are all important i...

Protein digestibility and trypsin inhibitor activity of legume seeds.

Post-genomics studies of developmental processes in legume seeds.

Legume seeds are an important source of food and feed, and have been principally studied with a view to optimizing the composition of reserve substances starch, oligosaccharides, oil, and protein. The availability of genome and transcribed genome sequences for the legume model species Medicago truncatula and Lotus japonicus has stimulated the application of the -omics technologies to understand...

Can we improve the nutritional quality of legume seeds?

The Food and Agriculture Organization statistics for 2001 (http://apps.fao.org/page/collections? subset agriculture) show that 274 million metric tons of grain legumes were produced across the world, of which 177 million were soybeans (Glycine max; one-half of which were produced in the U.S.) compared with 2 trillion metric tons of cereals. Legume seeds are put to a myriad of uses, both nutriti...