Legumes Biofortification

Sustainable food production is vital to ensure food and nutritional security to growing human population. Recently, there has been a shift in agricultural production system, crop production is not only considering yield as primary interest to produce higher number of calories for reducing hunger, but also more nutrient-rich food to reduce malnutrition or “hidden hunger”. Micronutrient malnutrition is a continuing and serious public health problem in many countries, various Interventions to alleviate this problem have been implemented. Biofortification, the process of breeding nutrients into food crops, provides a comparatively cost effective, sustainable, and long-term means of delivering more micronutrients. Legumes have higher protein content than most plant foods approximately twice than cereals and are rich in the key micronutrients folate, niacin, thiamine, calcium, iron and zinc. 


This book summarizes the biofortification of legumes. Detailed information through contributed chapters shed light on legumes research relevant to human health, with key topics that include genomic and genetic resources for food security, conventional and modern breeding approaches for improving nutrition, agronomic traits and biotechnological interventions.

Dr. Muhammad Azhar Nadeem is working as an Associate Professor of plant breeding and genetics at Sivas University of Science and Technology, Sivas, Turkey. His PhD thesis was entitled “Identification of Genomic Regions for Various Agronomic Traits in Turkish Common Bean Germplasm with Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS)”. He is currently engaged in research activities involving genetic diversity assessment, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for the identification of genomic regions, and their validation through KASP assay for marker-assisted breeding. Dr. Nadeem is focusing to perform GWAS in legumes, especially in common bean and lentil, and performing activities through national and international projects to identify genomic regions in these crops associated with mineral elements that will be helpful for the biofortification of these crops. He has a good number of publications in world-renowned and prestigious journals. He serves as an editorial board member of BMC Plant Biology, BMC Genomic Data, BMC Research Notes, Agriculture-MDPI, Plants-MDPI, Physiologia Plantarum, Frontiers in Plant Science, Molecular Biology Reports, Genetic Resources and crop evolution and Pakistan Journal of Botany. He has co-edited 1 book and written over 10 book chapters on important aspects of molecular genetics in relation to plant species. He has a good number of citations (1427) as per Google Scholar with an h-Index of 17.
Dr. Faheem Shehzad Baloch is working as Associate Professor of plant breeding and genetics at Sivas University of Science and Technology, Sivas, Turkey. He received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on ‘QTL mapping in wheat’ from the faculty of agriculture, University of çukurova, Adana, Turkey in 2012 with a joint fellowship of Turkish ministry of education and Turkish scientific and Technological council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK). In 2013, he started to work as assistant professor at Niğde ÖmerHalis Demir university, Niğde Turkey.In 2015, he joined Bolu Abant izzet Baysal Bolu, Turkey as Assistant professor. In 2018, he promoted to associate professor in the same institute. In August 2020, he joined Sivas university of science and Technology as associate professor and currently working in the same university. Dr. Faheem has more than 9 years of teaching and research experience in the plant phenomes, genetics and genomics, biotechnology specially in next generation sequencing (NGS) and DNA molecular markers in plant genetics for germplasm characterization, identification of genomic regions for traits of agricultural interest, development and validation of molecular markers for their use in marker assisted selection, and genomic prediction for plant improvement program particularly cereals and legumes and also for developing strategies for preserving this precious germplasm from Türkiye, which is the hot spot of biodiversity for most of agricultural crops and also thousands of endemic species. He leaded and participated in many projects funded by national and international organizations. He supervised and co-supervised MSC, PhD and post doc candidates from various countries. He participated in many international trainings on plant molecular genetics particularly at ICARDA-Syria, Cophenhagon University -Denmark, Minnesota University-USA. He has over 100 publications in Web of Sciences database. He has co-edited 6 books and written over 14 book chapters on important aspects of molecular genetics in relation to plant species. He has extensive array of citations with over 3000 times as per google scholar with an h-Index of 29. Dr. Baloch is active member of various COST action and also serve as Editorial board member of several impacted journals such as Turkish journal agriculture and forestry, BMC Genomic data, Agronomy Journal. Biotechnology and Biotechnological Equipment, BMC Plant Biology, and guest editor for special issues in different journals and also reviewer for more than 55 peer-reviewed international journals with more than 121 verified reviews according to WOS.
Dr. Sajid Fiaz, PhD, is an Assistant Professor working at Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, The University of Haripur, Pakistan. Dr. Fiaz’s research interests include marker assisted selection for agronomic traits, mutation breeding for biotic and abiotic stress resistance, QTL mapping and genome editing for yield and quality traits in cereals. Dr. Fiaz is actively supervising under-graduate and post-graduate students. He has published more than 100 research, 08 review articles and 12 book chapters with prestigious scientific magazines like International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Frontiers in Plant Sciences, Plant Physiology and Biochemistry and Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences. He is working as academic editor for PeerJ, guest associate editor for Frontiers in Plant Sciences, Molecular Biology Reports review editor for Frontiers in Genetics and have edited few special issues with Plants-MDPI, GM Crops and Food, Frontiers in Plant Sciences, Functional and Integrative Genomics and Molecular Biology Reports. Currently, his lab group is working to identify genetic factors controlling drought and salinity stress tolerance in exotic and local landraces of rice.

Dr. Muhammad Aasim, is a Professor at Department of Plant Protection, Sivas University of Science and Technology, Sivas, Turkey. He received his PhD in 2010 from Ankara University. He worked at Department of Biology, Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey University, Karaman, Türkiye, and Department of Biotechnology, Necmettin Erbakan University, Konya, Türkiye. He is currently engaged in research activities involving plant biotechnology, plant tissue culture, genetic transformation, phytoremediation, stress physiology, biopesticides, medicinal and aquatic plants. He has published 80 SCIE articles and cumulatively more than 100 research articles and 30 international book chapters. Currently, he isworking on application of nanomaterials, and artificial intelligence in plant biotechnology and plant sciences. He has 24 h-index and more than 1600 citations (Google Scholar).

Dr. Ephrem Habyarimana is a Principal Scientist at ICRISAT India, leading ICRISAT’s research on sorghum breeding to optimize the breeding program towards the aim of improving sorghum productivity and income generation, particularly for smallholder farmers. He is a PhD in Agricultural Genetics (Tuscia University, Italy), holds a Master’s degrees in Crop Science (Polytechnic University of Marche, Italy) and in Biotechnology Studies (University of Maryland University College, USA), and several other university degrees and training certificates obtained in Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe. Dr Habyarimana has documented skills and expertise of more than 25 years in crop science, genetics and plant breeding with a particular focus on sorghum. He integrates crop breeding with diverse technologies and skills – agroecological and genomic modelling, big data analytics (phenomics, genomics) – in the process of developing sustainable, resilient, cost-effective cultivars friendly to the environment and biodiversity. He has implemented international projects, including lighthouse projects supervised MS and PhD students, co-created sorghum varieties, edited books and authored several specialized scientific articles as documented in Scopus, Google Scholar and ResearchGate. Recognized as an inventor by the European Commission in the fields of exploratory and market-ready DeepTech innovations, he was a finalist in the 2019 European DatSci and AI Awards. Before joining ICRISAT, Dr. Ephrem Habyarimana was Research Scientist and Chief Scientist at CREA Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, the leading Italian research organization dedicated to agriculture, agri-food supply chains, food-science and nutrition, and socio-economics issues.

Dr. Osman Sönmez is a Professor in the Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Erciyes University, Kayseri, Turkey. He obtained his MS and PhD Agronomy from Kansas State University, Manhattan-KS, USA in the period 1996-2004. He worked in Harran University between 2004 and 2014. In 2014 he accepted the position of Associate Professor at Erciyes University. Since 2014, he has been working in the Department of Soil Science, Faculty of Agriculture, Erciyes University. He served three years as Vice-Dean at Harran University and also worked as vice-dean at the Erciyes University between 2020 and 2023. Currently, he is serving as the Dean of Agricultural Faculty at Erciyes University. He has published over 111 peer-reviewed papers, research and review articles on soil pollution, heavy metal accumulation, and bioremediation of soil by plant and soil amendment, plant physiology and plant nutrition. He has edited 6 books and contributed 2 book chapters published by CRC Press and Springer.
Nusret Zencirci is a graduate of Çukurova University, Faculty of Agriculture, Department of Field Crops. He worked as a wheat breeder in the Central Research Institute for Field Crops, Ankara and served as a National and International Coordinator to National -International Wheat programs and to International Winter Wheat Improvement Program. He is professor now at Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University, Science and Art Faculty, Biology Department, Bolu, Turkey. He is a member of various editorial boards in many international journals. He is, with his team, breeder of 22 bread and durum wheat cultivars. His research interests are Cereals, Biotic and Abiotic Stresses, Plant Genetic Resources, and Wheat Breeding.