Pea (Pisum sativum L.) was the original model organism used in Mendel’s discovery (1866) of the laws of inheritance, making it the foundation of modern plant genetics. However, subsequent progress in pea genomics has lagged behind many other plant species. Although the size and repetitive nature of the pea genome has so far restricted its sequencing, comprehensive genomic and post genomic resources already exist. These include BAC libraries, several types of molecular marker sets, both transcriptome and proteome datasets and mutant populations for reverse genetics. The availability of the full genome sequences of three legume species has offered significant opportunities for genome wide comparison revealing synteny and co-linearity to pea. A combination of a candidate gene and colinearity approach has successfully led to the identification of genes underlying agronomically important traits including virus resistances and plant architecture. Some of this knowledge has already been applied to marker assisted selection (MAS) programs, increasing precision and shortening the breeding cycle. Yet, complete translation of marker discovery to pea breeding is still to be achieved. Molecular analysis of pea collections has shown that although substantial variation is present within the cultivated genepool, wild material offers the possibility to incorporate novel traits that may have been inadvertently eliminated. Association mapping analysis of diverse pea germplasm promises to identify genetic variation related to desirable agronomic traits, which are historically difficult to breed for in a traditional manner. The availability of high throughput ‘omics’ methodologies offers great promise for the development of novel, highly accurate selective breeding tools for improved pea genotypes that are sustainable under current and future climates and farming systems.

Extreme climatic variation is predicted with climate change this century. In many cropping regions, the crop environment will tend to be warmer with more irregular rainfall and spikes in stress levels will be more severe. The challenge is not only to raise agricultural production for an expanding population, but to achieve this under more adverse environmental conditions. It is now possible to systematically explore the genetic variation in historic local landraces by using GPS locators and world climate maps to describe the natural selection for local adaptation, and to identify candidate germplasm for tolerances to extreme stresses. The physiological and biochemical components of these expressions can be genomically investigated with candidate gene approaches and next generation sequencing. Wild relatives of crops have largely untapped genetic variation for abiotic and biotic stress tolerances, and could greatly expand the available domesticated gene pools to assist crops to survive in the predicted extremes of climate change, a survivalomics strategy. Genomic strategies can assist in the introgression of these valuable traits into the domesticated crop gene pools, where they can be better evaluated for crop improvement. The challenge is to increase agricultural productivity despite climate change. This calls for the integration of many disciplines from eco-geographical analyses of genetic resources to new advances in genomics, agronomy and farm management, underpinned by an understanding of how crop adaptation to climate is affected by genotype × environment interaction.

Background: Grasspea (Lathyrus sativus L., 2n = 14), a member of the family Leguminosae, holds great agronomic potential as grain and forage legume crop in the arid areas for its superb resilience to abiotic stresses such as drought, flood and salinity. The crop could not make much progress through conventional breeding in the past, and there are hardly any detailed molecular biology studies due to paucity of reliable molecular markers representative of the entire genome. Results: Using the 454 FLX Titanium pyrosequencing technique, 651,827 simple sequence repeat (SSR) loci were identified and 50,144 nonredundant primer pairs were successfully designed, of which 288 were randomly selected for validation among 23 L. sativus and one L. cicera accessions of diverse provenance. 74 were polymorphic, 70 monomorphic, and 144 with no PCR product. The number of observed alleles ranged from two to five, the observed heterozygosity from 0 to 0.9545, and Shannon’s information index ranged from 0.1013 to 1.0980, respectively. The dendrogram constructed by using unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA) based on Nei's genetic distance, showed obvious distinctions and understandable relationships among the 24 accessions. Conclusions: The large number of SSR primer pairs developed in this study would make a significant contribution to genomics enabled improvement of grasspea.