REVIEW article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Abiotic Stress
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1573357
This article is part of the Research TopicUtilizing Advanced Genomics and Biochemical Tools to Strengthen Crop Adaptation for Biotic and Abiotic StressesView all 6 articles
Recent advances in enhancing drought tolerance in faba bean: insights from physiology, breeding, and genetics
Provisionally accepted
- 1Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, Germany
- 2Faculty of Science, Benha University, Benha, Egypt
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Among legumes, faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is considered a very important crop because it has a high protein content that can be useful for human and animal consumption. Abiotic stresses affect all agricultural crops. However, like other crops, it is vulnerable to various environmental challenges. Drought stress affects faba bean crops' production and productivity, but plants can mitigate its effects through physiological and biochemical changes, requiring further study. To date, few faba bean cultivars have been identified as drought-tolerant; therefore, more research efforts should be made to identify more drought-tolerant genotypes to be utilized in breeding programs. Moreover, new trends and advances in faba bean genetic research should be ideally employed to improve drought tolerance in faba bean genetically and rapidly, along with physiological and breeding research. Unfortunately, research on the molecular breeding of the faba bean is very slow because of its genome complexity, and very few studies have reported quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with drought tolerance. This review highlights recent physiological, breeding, and genetic research studies conducted on drought tolerance in faba bean. Faba bean drought-tolerant genotypes, promising genes for expression studies under drought stress, and putative significant markers associated with drought tolerance identified through genetic association studies were reported in this review.Therefore, this review may be an essential source for faba bean breeders and geneticists to obtain the most up-to-date information on recent studies that have been conducted on drought tolerance in faba beans from physiological, breeding, and genetic perspectives and to continue research on drought stress in faba beans.
Keywords: Vicia faba L., molecular breeding, Genetic adaptation, water deficit, GWAS, Gene Expression, Physiological mechanisms, Quantitative Trait Loci (QTL)
Received: 08 Feb 2025; Accepted: 25 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Sallam, Khalil and Börner. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ahmed Sallam, Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, Germany
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.