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Legumes are ecologically as well as economically important plants. They play a key role in the maintenance of soil fertility, particularly in dry rainfed areas, given its ability to fix atmospheric N2 (Yuvaraj et al., 2020). Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is the fourth most important legume that provides the main source of proteins and carbohydrates in diets, being considered one of the nutritionally best composed edible dry legumes for human consumption in semiarid tropical regions (Seyedimoradi et al., 2019). It is the second economically valuable legume pulse crop widely grown in almost all the continents. According to FAO (2021) it is grown in more than 50 countries with 17,217 million tons of production. In the average of production share of chickpeas by continents (1994–2021), Asia accounts for 84.9%, Africa for 4.7%, Americas for 4.4%, Oceania for 4.2% and Europe for 1.5%.
In Argentina, chickpea production increased from 19,500 tons in 2010 to 137,244 tons in 2020 (FAO, 2021). Domesticated chickpea has two distinct forms, desi type (small seeded, angular shape and coloured seeds with higher percentage of fibre) and kabuli type (large seeded, owl's head shaped, beige coloured seeds with a low percentage of fibre) (Singh et al., 2016). Argentina's chickpea production is almost exclusively of the kabuli type (cultivars S-156, Norteño, Kiara UNC INTA and Felipe UNC INTA), with desi type chickpea making up no more than 2% of the crop (Clera, 2019).
The loss of genetic diversity is a universal phenomenon among crops, mainly because of plant breeding (Valadez-Moctezuma et al., 2019). Nevertheless, there are two evolutionary bottlenecks typical of this crop: (1) the scarcity and limited distribution of the wild progenitor, C. reticulatum Ladiz, currently reported from only 18 narrowly distributed locations in the south-eastern Turkey (Berger et al., 2003) and (2) the shift, early in the crop's history (Early Bronze Age), from winter to spring sowing (perhaps due to ascochyta blight) and the attendant change from using rainfall as it occurs to a reliance on residual soil moisture (Abbo et al., 2003). This latter change was achieved by selecting against a vernalization response present in its progenitors, and implied a further loss of genetic diversity (Kumar and Abbo, 2001).
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