Interazione tra il genotipo e l'ambiente sul contenuto di amminoacidi in risorse genetiche di lenticchia

The genetic and phenotypic characterization of crop genetic resources is crucial to better understand their evolutionary history and the genetic basis of important traits. This knowledge could help the humankind to address the ongoing and future challenges, such as the increasing world population, the reduction of land availability for cultivation, the climate changes, and food quality, by exploiting the variation present in wild relatives and landraces to improve the performances of crops in sustainable agro-systems. In this context, legumes play a crucial role; indeed they are a source of proteins for human diets, alternative to the energy-costly and polluting animal breeding carried out for meat production, and they are able to enhance the soil quality by increasing nitrogen fixed by the symbiotic bacteria (Rhizobia ssp.) living on the roots of these crops. Recently, several national and international projects aimed to the characterization of legume genetic resources for different traits were funded, indicating an increasing awareness of the importance of such crops and to overcome the lack of previous efforts in breeding. One example, is represented by the INCREASE project, funded by European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No 862862). This project aims to develop a new approach to manage, use and characterize the genetic resources of the most consumed four species in Europe: common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), chickpea, (Cicer arietinum), lentil, (Lens culinaris) and lupin (Lupinus albus and L. mutabilis). This can favour the production of plant derived protein in Europe (that it scarce nowadays since this continent use only 3% of arable land to produce it and it imports most legumes European people consume), through implementing the suitability of legumes to European agro-ecosystems. The main aim of the present thesis is to characterize the nutritional quality of diverse lentil genetic resources, grown in different environments, in order to identify differences in content of amino acids among the different genotypes and to investigate the effect of genotype, environment and genotype by environment interaction on the detected amino acids levels. Such knowledge will represent a tool for breeders and researchers to identify interesting genotypes characterized by a higher nutritional quality and, at the same time, to guide breeding in improving nutritional quality of lentil varieties.