Cultivation of legume plants is well known to improve soil N level and net primary productivity; besides, it may deliver other ecosystem benefits such as increasing soil carbon sequestration and soil food web complexity. However, little is known about whether legumes can improve the resistance of soils to ecosystem disturbances. In the present study, we compared the resistance of soils to an ec...

Many plants can establish symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, some of which lead to nodulation, including legumes. Indeed, in the rhizobium/legume symbiosis, new root organs, called nodules, are formed by the plant in order to host the rhizobia in protective conditions, optimized for nitrogen fixation. In this way, these plants can benefit from the reduction of atmospheric dinitrogen into ...

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...

The aim of this study was to isolate, identify and characterize ascochyta blight pathogens from Cicer judaicum , a wild annual Cicer species which grows in Israel and other Mediterranean countries in sympatric distribution with legume crops, and determine their virulence and aggressiveness to other wild and domesticated legumes. Native C. judaicum plants exhibited symptoms resembling ascochyta ...

This research sought to link Andean soil knowledge and farmer categorization of soil fertility to soil science characterization of soils, and use these to understand the impacts of phosphorus (P) fertilization of legumes using rock phosphate and soluble P fertilizer in 17 smallholder-managed sites with varying soil properties. We found that farmer high/low categorization of soils corresponded t...

Legume-rhizobium symbiosis is achieved by two major events evolutionarily acquired: root hair infection and organogenesis. Infection thread (IT) development is a distinct element for rhizobial infection. Through ITs, rhizobia are efficiently transported from infection foci on root hairs to dividing meristematic cortical cells. To unveil this process, we performed genetic screening using Lotus j...

Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan L.), a diploid legume crop, is a member of the tribe Phaseoleae. This tribe is descended from the millettioid (tropical) clade of the subfamily Papilionoideae, which includes many important legume crop species such as soybean (Glycine max), mung bean (Vigna radiata), cowpea (Vigna ungiculata), and common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). It plays major role in food and nutriti...

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...

Evolutionary relationships were inferred among a worldwide sample of Ascochyta fungi from wild and cultivated legume hosts based on phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences from the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS), as well as portions of three protein-coding genes: glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate-dehydrogenase (G3PD), translation elongation factor 1-alpha (EF) and chitin synthase 1...

The legume-rhizobium symbiosis is an ideal model for studying the factors that limit the evolution of microbial mutualists into parasites. Legumes are unable to consistently recognize parasitic rhizobia that, once established inside plant cells, use plant resources for their own reproduction rather than for N2 fixation. Evolution of parasitism in rhizobia, driven partly by competition among mul...