Genetic Diversity of Grain Legumes for Food and Nutritional Security

The biodiversity of grain legumes has a great important role in food and nutritional security worldwide. Grain legumes are a vital component of the human diet and also increased in demand past few years due to its other nutritional and health benefits over the main crop grains. Being cheaper than animal protein sources, legumes are important components of plant protein diets and sources of fibre, minerals and essential amino acids. To meet the demand to feed the ever-increasing world population and combat malnutrition, legume family is highly adaptable with global prevalence and enhancement of productivity in a view of yield and enhancement of environment resilience becomes more significant. For legume improvement, different approaches from conventional, marker-based to biotechnological approaches have been used for higher yield contributing traits, as well as attaining yield stability by the development of resilient legume crops for various environmental factors, i.e. biotic and abiotic. To cater to nutritional security, grain legumes are important as a principal source of dietary protein to a major population as well as for micronutrients, vitamins, amino acids, and dietary minerals. Grain legume also provides riboflavin, pyridoxine, thiamine, niacin, folate, and vitamins. The significant increase in the demand for plant-based proteins globally as the nutritional profiles of cereal grains makes them the most robust alternative to meat-source proteins. Additionally, legumes are also a good source of healthy fats, as soybeans along with groundnuts can be good, healthy, low-cost alternative sources of cooking oils to unhealthy palm oil or animal fats. House of proteins, fibre, starch, minerals, and vitamins legumes play a role as fundamental crops of the human diet and are also used as functional food for improvement in healthiness and dealing with ailments such as arthritis, diabetes, depression, gastrointestinal, and cardiovascular diseases to human health. The role of grains and legumes as a food source, fictional food, and nutritional valuable crops which can be further increased by biofortification and value addition will contribute to food and nutritional security worldwide.