GCRF-BBR: Developing a hybrid bean collection to advance climate-ready bean breeding

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Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) is the most important food legume in the human diet, providing protein, micronutrients and complex carbohydrates for >300 million people in the tropics. Climate change scenarios predict that heat/drought and pests and diseases will be major pressures on bean production in the future. As with most major crops, and because of its domestication history, cultivated common bean lacks genetic diversity. Wild relatives can be used to introduce this diversity for key traits of interest, and in some cases have already been used successfully to provide novel sources of resistance to pests and diseases in beans. This is by no means an easy process, as producing the next generation of plants from these "wide crosses" is difficult, making it hard for breeding programs to make use of the opportunities offered by these wild plants. However, wide crosses occur naturally where farmers grow cultivated beans adjacent to wild populations, as happens across the natural range of beans from Mexico to Argentina. A number of these naturally occurring cultivated-wild hybrids populations have already been collected from sites throughout Central and South America and are stored in the CIAT genebank. We will characterise plants from twenty hybrid populations for priority breeding traits linked to climate change e.g. pest and disease resistance, and heat and drought tolerance. We will explore their genomes and provide all of this information to the bean breeding and research communities in an accessible way, to help users select the most suitable plants for their purpose. We will hold workshops and demonstrations to make sure that breeders and researchers are aware of this resource and understand how best to make use of it.By reducing the barriers to inclusion of wild plants into bean breeding programmes, we will help breeders to produce better beans in a shorter time, which will have a positive impact on global food security.