Preface

Legumes are plants from the Fabaceae family. Fabaceae is the third largest family among the angiosperms and they have vast economic importance. These plants provide food, fodder, fuel, medicine, and many other uses. Legume crops are a low-cost protein source and sometimes called the 'poor man's protein'. Legumes can fix nitrogen, and hence the requirement of exogenous nitrogen is low. Therefore, they are used as a soil enhancer, and some of the legume species are cultivated as green manure crops. In a sustainable agricultural system, legume crops are one of the essential components. However, improving the productivity of legume crops and improving their tolerance to adverse environments are important tasks for plant biologists.

This book presents nine chapters dealing with the importance, production and various uses of legumes. In the first chapter, the status of legume crops in the world and their prospects for sustainable agriculture are discussed. In the second chapter, many aspects of soil fertility improvement by legumes are discussed. The authors discuss how legumes play a role in maintaining soil health and nutrient status. In the third and fourth chapter, various aspects of soybean production and breeding, as well as their diverse use as food, are discussed. The fifth chapter presents some important aspects of organic grain legumes in India. In chapter 6, the approaches for soybean production under salinity are described. Salinity is one of the most devastating abiotic stressors for soybean. In this chapter, the authors show the plant responses and tolerance to salinity. In the next chapter, the authors show how beneficial microorganisms could confer stress tolerance in legumes. In chapter 8, the authors discuss the bioactive compounds from velvet beans. Chapter 9 presents a fascinating legume species, Hedysarum - their biology and production in the Caucasus.

I want to give special thanks to the authors for their outstanding and timely work in producing such excellent chapters. I am very thankful to Dajana Pemac and Lada Bozic, Author Service Managers at IntechOpen, for their prompt responses during the acquisition. I believe that this book will be useful for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and researchers, particularly from the field of Crop Science, Soil Science, Plant Breeding and Agronomy.

**II**

**Chapter 8 135**

**Chapter 9 147**

Bioactive Components of Magical Velvet Beans

*by Serebryanaya Fatima and Imachueva Djavgarat*

*Hedysarum* Species from Caucasus

*and Jyoti P. Jadhav*

*by Suresh S. Suryawanshi, Prajakta P. Kamble, Vishwas A. Bapat* 

**Mirza Hasanuzzaman** Sher-e-Bangla Agricultural University, Dhaka, Bangladesh

**1**

tropics.

**Chapter 1**

**Abstract**

legumes

**1. Introduction**

Sustainability

genetic base of legume cultigens.

Legume Genetic Resources:

Status and Opportunities for

*Kuldeep Tripathi, Padmavathi G. Gore, Mamta Singh,* 

Legumes are one of the most valuable gifts of nature to man, animal, and environment. These are sustainable, affordable, water-efficient, and low-carbon footprint crop. Globally, the share of grain legume accessions is 15% of 7.4 million accessions conserved in genebanks, of which more than half of germplasm in genebanks are without characterization and evaluation data which ultimately limit the utilization of germplasm in legume improvement programs. Characterization of all genebank accessions should be of utmost priority for enhancing the utilization. The development of core, mini-core, reference sets, and trait-specific germplasm has provided route to crop breeders for mining genebanks. Identification of new sources of variation became easy with these subsets, but the entire collection also needs to be evaluated for unique and rare traits. In crop species with narrow genetic base, utilization of crop wild relatives as well as new resources aids to widen the

**Keywords:** core collection, crop wild relatives, diversity, genetic resources and

nutritious food in the face of climate change, population explosion, and rapid urbanization and to do so in an environmentally sustainable manner. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number 2 explicitly recognizes the pivotal role that genetic diversity plays for food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture. Legumes, together with cereals, played a prominent role to the development of modern agriculture. The legume family, Fabaceae, is the third largest family of flowering plants, with 946 genera and 24,505 species [1]. Few domesticated ones have incontestably proven to be of crucial nutritional value for both humans and animals due to their protein content, causing them to be recognized as the second most valuable plant source of nutrients [2]. Legumes are extensively distributed in diverse agroclimatic zones globally, from alpine and arctic regions to the equatorial

One of the biggest challenges in the twenty-first century is to produce sufficient

The peculiar characteristics of the family are taproot system; bipinnate leaves; flower with corolla, standard petal (1), wing petal (2), and keel (2) (**Figure 1**); and

*Ravi K. Pamarthi, Reena Mehra and Gayacharan C*
