NCB 280, NCB 226, SEN 56, SCR 2, SCR 16, SMC 141, RCB 593, and BFS 67, these are the technical names of the eight elite bean lines identified as parents to start new crossings improved for drought resistance at CIAT’s Bean Program. It has thus been reported in the recently published paper entitled Effective use of water and increased dry matter partitioned to grain contribute to yield of common bean improved for drought resistance.

This is the result of two years of teamwork between Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and CIAT’s Bean Program, with support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). There is no doubt that this is good news to keep celebrating the International Year of Pulses, where beans are one of the main crops, taking into account that nearly 400 million people, especially in Africa and Latin America, consume it on a daily basis.

For bean crop, drought and heat are two main abiotic stress factors limiting production of a proper amount of good quality grains. The importance of this study lies in the fact that, by using a pioneering approach, it contributes to responding the two-fold objective of identifying specific morphological and physiological traits that would help the breeding programs to select beans resistant to drought, as well as to select genotypes with desirable traits that can be used by those breeding programs as parents to improve drought resistance.