Legume Generation Report 10
Progressing the breeding of lupin
Fred Eickmeyer, Helge Flüß, Karolina Susek, Donal Murphy-Bokern
Lupins play an important role in European agriculture for food and feed protein production, especially in regions with poor sandy soils and frequent pre-summer drought. In the Legume Generation project, the Lupin Innovation Community (LUPIC) works together to improve grain yield and yield stability, which is urgently needed to serve farmers´ needs. Since the genepool of sweet lupins is genetically very narrow, the LUPIC approach is to develop new/better traits from bitter lupins to finally breed sweet lupin cultivars.
In our innovation community, we characterise genetic resources with emphasis on agronomically important traits like alkaline soil tolerance, winter hardiness, disease tolerance, heat and drought tolerance, flower and pod non-dehiscence combined with high protein content and grain yield. In several cases we have to develop tools in order to understand inheritance of traits of interest. The tool development as well as the plant material development is in track with our plans and expectations.
We have shared our germplasm to carry out field trials in Germany, Poland, Greece and United Kingdom (Wales) for white lupins and narrow leafed lupins. Due to very limited seed availability Andean lupins could only be tested in Italy.
