Legumes: developing better crops

CSIRO is working with legume seed crops, such as soybeans, lupins, chickpeas and cowpeas, to develop drought tolerance, improve nutritional value and tackle disease.

26 February 2007 | Updated 12 January 2012

Soybeans
Lupins
Chickpeas
Cowpeas
Medicago
Related information sheets
Related scientific papers

Legume seed crops are important rotational crops which fix nitrogen and produce nutritionally valuable seed for human and stock consumption.

Soybeans

CSIRO is breeding soybeans that are better suited to making soy foods such as tofu and soymilk.

We lead the national soybean improvement program with varieties bred for all soybean growing regions of Australia and Vietnam.

Legume seed crops are important rotational crops which fix nitrogen and produce nutritionally valuable seed for human and stock consumption.

Soybeans are grown either with irrigation or in the coastal higher rainfall zones, but could be grown more widely if they weren’t so sensitive to water shortages.

Australia’s 20 native soybean species are not grown commercially, but are a source of genetic diversity that could potentially contain useful traits such as grain quality, disease resistance or drought tolerance.

CSIRO is aiming to develop DNA markers that flag the location of potentially useful genes, which will help speed the delivery of improved varieties.

Lupins

CSIRO improved the nutritional value of lupins, a common stockfeed, by adding a sunflower gene. The resultant lupins were more nutritious and, when fed to sheep, increase wool and meat production.

CSIRO is also investigating yield stability in lupins to identify the factors responsible for erratic yield and the lack of response to favourable environments in the crop.

Chickpeas

Chickpea productivity in Australia is constrained because it is not well adapted as a winter annual; it cannot set pods under cool conditions. This exposes the crop to drought late in the season every year.

CSIRO is characterising chickpeas from different environments so that we can identify cold tolerance in wild and cultivated chickpea relatives.

Cowpeas

Cowpea is an important staple grain crop for resource-poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa.

CSIRO is attempting to protect cowpeas against two devastating pests by incorporating a Bt gene that will protect against the pod-borer caterpillar, and a gene from common bean that protects the seed from cowpea weevils.

Medicago

CSIRO is using the legume Medicago truncatula as a 'model' legume to research legume biology. We are using Medicago to help combat pests and diseases of legumes.

We are investigating the defence mechanisms that protect Medicago from certain fungal pathogens in order to understand how they provide resistance.

CSIRO is also developing legumes with 'built-in' resistance to aphids: a common problem of legumes. Some Medicago plants have been found with aphid resistance and CSIRO is studying how this resistance can be introduced into other legume species.