Translational Genomic Resources for Common Bean: The Beancap Support System.

Crops confront climate change from two fronts.  Most often we hear of global warming with its resulting effects of drought and heat that reduce crop productivity.  Another less appreciated climate change scenario affects crops with smaller production bases.  Their acreage is often sacrificed when crops with greater returns per acre or with a greater ease of production become more dominant in a production system.  To meet the needs of the food system, these crops are moved to less productive, marginal lands that are less fertile or located in regions were stress is already a factor.  If this happens multiple times over decade-long breeding cycles, yield gains realized on productive land are often lost when the crop is moved to these marginal lands.  To confront change in a timely manner, it is important to develop a rich suite of research tools and discoveries that crop improvement programs can utilize to rapidly address these changing conditions.  For common bean, these resources are being delivered by the USDA/NIFA Common Bean Coordinated Agricultural Project (BeanCAP).  One resource is a panel of >500 modern cultivars, representing all major dry and snap bean market classes, that was genotyped with ~10,000 SNPs.  The BeanCAP genotyping service is a resource supporting individual investigators as they address multiple research questions by providing SNP data at 6,000 loci for >8,000 genotypes.  Genetic factors for over 30 agronomic and nutritional traits associated with production in normal and drought conditions will be discovered from the evaluation of two 2011 field trials.  One consisted of 300 modern bean varieties of Mesoamerican origin grown under normal production conditions in four states.  The second trial evaluated 100 varieties grown in four states under drought and normal conditions.  The discovery of those genetic factors will inform decisions important to long-term productivity of this important nutritional crop.