RESUMO
Legumes and brassicas have much in common: importance in agricultural history, rich biodiversity, numerous forms of use, high adaptability to diverse farming designs, and various non-food applications. Rare available resources demonstrate intercropping legumes and brassicas as beneficial to both, especially for the latter, profiting from better nitrogen nutrition. Our team aimed at designing a scheme of the intercrops of autumn- and spring-sown annual legumes with brassicas for ruminant feeding and green manure, and has carried out a set of field trials in a temperate Southeast European environment and during the past decade, aimed at assessing their potential for yields of forage dry matter and aboveground biomass nitrogen and their economic reliability via land equivalent ratio. This review provides a cross-view of the most important deliverables of our applied research, including eight annual legume crops and six brassica species, demonstrating that nearly all the intercrops were economically reliable, as well as that those involving hairy vetch, Hungarian vetch, Narbonne vetch and pea on one side, and fodder kale and rapeseed on the other, were most productive in both manners. Feeling encouraged that this pioneering study may stimulate similar analyses in other environments and that intercropping annual legume and brassicas may play a large-scale role in diverse cropping systems, our team is heading a detailed examination of various extended research.
RESUMO
Ancient DNA (aDNA) is any DNA extracted from ancient specimens, important for diverse evolutionary researches. The major obstacles in aDNA studies are mutations, contamination and fragmentation. Its studies may be crucial for crop history if integrated with human aDNA research and historical linguistics, both general and relating to agriculture. Legumes (Fabaceae) are one of the richest end economically most important plant families, not only from Neolithic onwards, since they were used as food by Neanderthals and Paleolithic modern man. The idea of extracting and analyzing legume aDNA was considered beneficial for both basic science and applied research, with an emphasis on genetic resources and plant breeding. The first reported successful and attested extraction of the legume aDNA was done from the sample of charred seeds of pea (Pisum sativum) and bitter vetch (Vicia ervilia) from Hissar, southeast Serbia, dated to 1,350-1,000 Before Christ. A modified version of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method and the commercial kit for DNA extraction QIAGEN DNAesy yielded several ng µl(-1) of aDNA of both species and, after the whole genome amplification and with a fragment of nuclear ribosomal DNA gene 26S rDNA, resulted in the detection of the aDNA among the PCR products. A comparative analysis of four informative chloroplast DNA regions (trnSG, trnK, matK, and rbcL) among the modern wild and cultivated pea taxa demonstrated not only that the extracted aDNA was genuine, on the basis of mutation rate, but also that the ancient Hissar pea was most likely an early domesticated crop, related to the modern wild pea of a neighboring region. It is anticipated that this premier extraction of legume aDNA may provide taxonomists with the answers to diverse questions, such as leaf development in legumes, as well as with novel data on the single steps in domesticating legume crops worldwide.
