New chickpea hope

COGGO chief executive Mark Tucek, UWA Professor Tim Colmer and Professor Neil Turner look over Desi chickpeas which are being used as part of a breeding program to develop ascochyta-resistant and salt-tolerant chickpeas. PHOTO: DANELLA BEVIS

Hopes that WA's chickpea industry can be resurrected have been given a boost after researchers revealed improved varieties could be ready to sow in two years.

Before the fungus ascochyta blight decimated chickpea yields in the 1990s, the WA industry was worth about $30 million as growers planted 70,000 hectares across the State.

Council of Grain Grower Organisations (COGGO) executive officer Mark Tucek said that in the last decade production had dropped to just 1000ha due to the disease.

"Before ascochyta hit it was an industry with considerable potential," he said.

But growers could be set to cash in on $400 a tonne prices for chickpeas once again, because COGGO-funded research has opened the way for future release of chickpea varieties with resistance to ascochyta, and eventually, with improved tolerance to salinity.

Breeding for ascochyta resistance has been the main focus of a joint project, carried out by the Department of Agriculture and Food WA pulse breeding team.

With ascochyta-resistant lines well into development, improvement of salinity tolerance then also became a priority.

Particularly sensitive to salinity, chickpea yields may suffer in soils where cereals will grow happily.

Winthrop Professor Neil Turner, of the University of WA's Centre for Legumes in Mediterranean Agriculture (CLIMA), who is involved with the chickpea project, said joint research conducted in India with the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) was looking at ascochyta blight resistance but had also shown variations in salt sensitivity.

"The situation is that prior to this project starting it was considered that there was virtually no salt tolerance in chickpeas and there was pretty well equal salt sensitivity among all the genotypes," he said.

Last year 50 of the most salt-tolerant lines discovered at ICRISAT were introduced to WA and trialled in the field alongside local cultivars.

"We still haven't looked at the data but it's pretty clear just from visual inspection that most local lines are sensitive and we have lines that are now quite salt tolerant," Dr Turner said.

Researchers hope to be able to cross the parents of the salt-tolerant lines to those that have ascochyta resistance to create a chickpea variety for WA conditions.

Salinity project leader, UWA's Professor Tim Colmer, said the team was also looking for DNA markers that indicated salt tolerance in chickpea.

"We've already taken tolerant and sensitive lines at ICRISAT where they've been crossed to make a mapping population and we're now looking for molecular markers, which are DNA markers that correlate with the salt tolerance," he said.

"That speeds up future breeding because you then don't have to grow 300 or 3000 lines on a saline field and try to pick the salt-tolerant lines."

The team estimates conservatively that farmers could expect an ascochyta-resistant chickpea variety from the program by 2012 or 2013, with lines that are ascochyta resistant and more salt tolerant available within six or seven years.

Dr Turner said that in a "stroke of luck" researchers might have stumbled on an existing line that already shows ascochyta resistance and salt tolerance.

"One of the surprise outcomes of this year has been that one of the lines that has been developed for ascochyta resistance in Victoria appears to be quite salt tolerant," he said.

"So it may well be that all we have to do is look at some of the lines that are being brought in and evaluated for ascochyta resistance because some of them may also have higher salt tolerance."

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