Vigna interspecies hybrids

[wildedge]

Has anyone ever seen interspecies hybrids of Vigna beans? Apparently all the major pulse species are cross compatible, but very little work has been done on them. I am planning on crossing mung beans (V. radiata) that grow very well here but are strains optimised for industrial agriculture with rice bean (V. umbellata) and moth bean (V. aconitifolia) and maybe some adzuki (V. angularis) though it seems to prefer cooler weather. The final black gram (V. mungo) should be around somewhere to try as well. I'm thinking of using mung as the seed parent and others as pollen parents. I'm setting up pollen storage as well to get around non-synchronous flowering. I would add cowpeas to the mix as they grow well here but we get terrible sucking bug (pod sucking bug, Riptorus seripes) infestations that ruin the seeds even though the plant grow very well. Oddly mung beans arent bothered (might be the hairs on the pods?)

[blueadzuki]

That's a hard question to answer. I search through a lot of rice beans for my work, and every now and then I find one that LOOKS like what I imagine a rice/adzuki cross could look like (adzukis short fat rounded shape but with a rice beans trademark "lips" over the hilum) But whether those ARE actually hybrids, or simply unusually short and fat rice beans, I as yet do not know)

If you are starting this cold, you should probably know that most rice beans are REALLY day length sensitive. For you that might not be an issue (you say your frosts are only rare, so you probably usually have year round growing time. But I though you should know. There IS a type of rice bean that flowers and sets pods much earlier, but it is less common (look for larger, duller seeds that are brick red as opposed to dark maroon).

[troppo]

I don't think this is possible but I may be wrong. A colleague of mine is a mungbean breeder and also breeds black gram. Apparently from what he has found these are incompatible with each other and both are incompatible with adzuki bean. His desire is to transfer the disease resistance of black gram into mungbean but incompatibilities between the species prevent him from achieving this.

Have you got any links to the papers/articles that suggest it may be achievable?

Another possibility is utilising some of the Australian wild relative species as some of these are compatible with mungbean and offer huge genetic possibilities. Some I believe are even perennial.

[blueadzuki]

I did a little more research and it turns out that even crossing adzukis and rice beans (which are closer than most to each other) is very hard (though some people think it might be possible with the use of V. riukuesis as a bridge species) so getting mungs in is probably impossible.

[wildedge]

I found this paper

INTERSPECIFIC CROSSABILITY AMONG FOUR SPECIES OF VIGNA FOOD LEGUMES
N.C.CHEN 1982

and it says that

"Complete hybrid sterility was found in the interspecific crosses of V. radiata x V. umbellata. V. radiata x V. angularis and V. mungo x V. angularis; while reduced fertility was observed for the interspecific hybrids of V. radiuta x V. mungo. V. umbellata x V. angularis and V. angularis x V. umbellata"

So it looks like there is a window for mung x black gram. It apparently depends on the strain of mungbean used as a seed parent. I will give that cross a go this season and see if I can get any pods setting. If not I will try again with other mung strains if I can track down some diversity.

[blueadzuki]

Aug 15, 2017 8:17:07 GMT -5 wildedge said:

If not I will try again with other mung strains if I can track down some diversity.

That's actually going to be a lot trickier than it sounds. Much as with azukis, a lot of the diversity in mung beans has been sacrificed in the name of a consistent product, so finding material out of the standard can be hard. If you can pull the trick off with either the Major (larger, dull green, common in China) or minor (smaller, bright green, common in Southeast Asia) that's great. But if you need something like near wild mung beans, you may have a problem. I have a few (and no, I don't have enough to share, even if I COULD get them through Australian customs) but it's taken me literally DECADES to assemble the handful I have.

The only advice I can give is to find some Chinese Herb shop that has the less common type of rice beans (larger, dull surface, more of a hot-dog color than the standard garnet red) and scoop around there. If you are lucky, you may find one or two smaller wild type mungs. Then it's a matter of seed increase.