In the face of climate change, developing resilient crops is crucial for global food security in the 21st century to feed a growing population. Lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus) plays a vital role in ensuring global food and nutritional security. Traits like early flowering enable the crop to mature faster, thereby shortening the growing window and reducing yield losses caused by moisture and heat stresses during the reproductive phase. However, issues like limited genetic diversity in this trait remain unaddressed. To address this gap, our study aims to comprehensively assess genetic variability and trait associations in 158 lentil accessions. In the present study, we observed significant variations for days to 50% flowering (67–90 days), days to maturity (109–122 days) and 100 seed weight (1.69–2.68 g) throughout a period of two consecutive years (2020–2021 and 2021–2022). The observed variability in these traits offers a valuable avenue for the improvement of lentil yield through targeted selection and hybridization. Additionally, correlation analysis showed negative correlation between days to 50% flowering and grain yield per plant, while plant height had a significant (P < 0.01) positive correlation with all traits except yield per plant. Furthermore, we identified specific germplasm with exceptional traits that hold significant potential for future breeding programmes. The genotypes EC 223197-A and EC 267696 were identified for early flowering with high yield, and other genotypes that were identified for various traits would serve as breeding material for the introgression of these traits into elite cultivars.

Chickpea is the third most important grain legume grown in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. In spite of vast germplasm accessions available in different genebanks, there has been very limited use of these accessions in genetic enhancement of chickpea. However, in recent years, specialized germplasm subsets such as global composite collection, core collection, mini core collection and reference set have been developed. In parallel, significant genomic resources such as molecular markers including simple sequence repeats (SSRs), single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), diversity arrays technology (DArT) and transcript sequences, e.g. expressed sequence tags, short transcript reads, have been developed. By using SSR, SNP and DArT markers, integrated genetic maps have been developed. It is anticipated that the use of genomic resources and specialized germplasm subsets such as mini core collection and reference set will facilitate identification of trait-specific germplasm, trait mapping and allele mining for resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses and for agronomic traits. Advent of the next generation sequencing technologies coupled with advances in bioinformatics offers the possibility of undertaking large-scale sequencing of germplasm accessions so that modern breeding approaches such as genomic selection and breeding by design can be realized in near future for chickpea improvement.