Growing the "right" lentil in the "right" environment - how can we tell?

    We have many different types of lentil grown in over 50 countries around the world.  The timing to grow the crop is different depending on where you are.  In Canada, lentil is sown in May and harvested in August.  Whereas in Nepal, lentil is sown in October and harvested in February the year after.  In Mediterranean countries such as Italy, lentil is sown in October but won't be harvested until May/June.

    Most lentil varieties only perform well under a specific climate and fail when they are grown in under a different climate.  Yield is closely related to adaptation and that is why breeders tend to use only a few local varieties in their crosses.  To allow breeders to expand their choices, we need to know how different lentils interact and adapt to different environments, i.e. changing daylength and temperature over the growing season.  Better understanding of the genetic mechanism that affects how lentil grow and mature in a specific climatic condition will help breeders to more effectively choose the lines in their crosses.

Materials/Methods: 

Experimental locations:

Saskatchewan in Canada, Metaponto in Italy, and Bardiya in Nepal in 2016 and 2017. 

Genotypes:

The Lentil Diversity Panel under the AGILE project

Field Data (phenotypic):

Days to Emergence, Days to Flowering and Days to Maturity with environmental data especially temperature and photoperiod. 

Genotyped Data:

Exome Capture data from Knowpulse web portal. 

Results:

As expected, lentil that is well-adapted in one environment performed poorly when it's grown in a different environment (Fig 1). 

Figure 1. Variation in the overall performances noticed when genotype from one environment grown in a different environment. Performance of - A) Genotype from South Asia when grown in Saskatchewan, B) Temperate genotype in Saskatchewan, C) South Asian genotype in Nepal, D) Temperate genotype in Nepal.

Who is Working on this:

Sandesh Neupane

Derek Wright