Update on African Orphan Legumes and the registration of Lablab in Tanzania

Session: Legumes are the chief source of global dietary protein for most of the small holder farmers. Although, there are several legumes existing, only few have been domesticated and utilized by the human community. Anticipating the most burning challenge on overcoming the adverse effects of global climate change and feeding the ever increasing human and livestock population, there is an critical need to explore the potentiality of the under exploited legumes to overcome the situation. With this background a set of under exploited legumes such as Rice bean, Moth bean, Dolichos lablab, Tepary bean, Lima bean, Horse gram and Bambara groundnut have been evaluated in comparison with common legumes such as Cowpea, green gram and Pigeon pea. The performance of the some of the above under exploited legumes prove to be well suited to African drylands enhancing the nutritional food security and improves the livelihoods of the rural people.

Biographical information: Dr. Pavithravani B Venkataramana, is a Seed technologist and Molecular biologist presently serving as Lecturer in The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Arusha, Tanzania. She has been working with the underexploited orphan legumes since 2011 to understand its potentiality and its possible contribution to global food security. For first time she has also developed EST- SSR markers in Dolichos. Has 10 years of research experience on some aspects of life sciences such as seed production, seed storage, seed quality, morphological and genetic characterization, development of genetic linkage maps , QTL analysis etc.