Figure 1 - Natural hybrid (# 3314) possibly involving P. costaricensis and P. dumosus in humid montane forest. 2 Report on Bioprospecting for Phaseolus germplasm in Costa Rica, November 2016. D.G. Debouck R. Araya Villalobos, N. Chaves Barrantes Genetic Resources Program Agricultural Experimental Station ‘Fabio Baudrit Moreno’ Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical Universidad de Costa Rica Cali, COLOMBIA San José, COSTA RICA
[email protected] [email protected] ;
[email protected] Cooperative work between the Estación Experimental Agrícola ‘Fabio Baudrit Moreno’ of the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR), and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), with the support of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT), in the framework of the Crop Wild Relatives Project. Introduction Wild relatives of crops have often been reported as sources of useful genetic variation in crop improvement when this variation is absent in the crops themselves (Hajjar & Hodgkin 2007; Harlan 1978). The reason for this situation might be two-fold: i) the fact that the major part of the original genetic variation has not been included in the cultivated genetic stock during the domestication process, and ii) the relative shorter duration in existence of the cultivated forms as compared to their wild relatives. Common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L., provides a good example of this double situation. On the one hand, all cultivated varieties of common bean in Central America, even though they diversify into three races (Singh et al. 1991), originate from a single domestication area in western Mexico (Chacón-Sánchez et al. 2005; Kwak et al. 2009). All other populations have been left as part of the natural wild flora not being considered by people except when used as a famine food when local communities harvest the green pods (Araya-Villalobos et al.