Engineering safe faba beans by targeting the anti-nutrients vicine and convicine

Faba bean is a high-yielding protein crop well adapted to cold climates.

Its seeds contain large amounts of protein, antioxidants, and micronutrients, making it an ideal crop to support the transition toward a plant-based diet. However, faba bean seeds also accumulate high levels of the anti-nutritional alkaloids vicine and convicine.

These alkaloids cause hemolytic anemia (favism) in individuals with a genetic deficiency (G6PD deficiency) occurring in ~5% of the world population.

Faba bean varieties with reduced levels of vicine and convicine exist, but the residual levels are variable, causing concern for the food industry.

The development of varieties devoid of vicine and convicine has been hampered by a lack of genomic resources and insufficient knowledge about their biosynthesis. In the CleanBean project, I will team up with Prof. Fernando Geu-Flores from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences of the University of Copenhagen.

I will use recently generated resources to uncover the full vicine and convicine pathway and create faba bean lines devoid of these anti-nutrients.

The proposed work involves gene selection through co-regulation & association strategies, pathway elucidation using in vitro and in vivo assays, and pathway inactivation in faba bean using the recently published FIND-IT technology (non-GMO). The impact of CleanBean will be multifaceted, spanning both fundamental and applied research.

On the basic science side, the project will uncover the complete pathway of a nucleotide-derived specialized metabolite from plants for the first time.

On the applied side, the project will lead to the creation of a vicine- and convicine-free faba bean, thus enabling the safe consumption of faba beans by all individuals and helping transform the landscape of sustainable food production.