NOTES ON NEGLECTED AND UNDERUTILIZED CROPS Resources and opportunities for re-establishing Lathyrus cicera L. as a multipurpose cultivated plant Karl Hammer . Gaetano Laghetti . Paolo Direnzo . Alfredo Castelli . Aleksandar Mikic ´ Received: 27 August 2018 / Accepted: 7 November 2018 Ó Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract Lathyrus cicera L. is one of the oldest cultivated plants in the world, originating in the Mediterranean centre of diversity. Together with its close relative, L. sativus, it is most likely the first crop domesticated in Europe, namely in the Iberian Penin- sula and southern France. Today, L. cicera is sharing the destiny of numerous, legume, cereal and other once widely grown species, becoming largely neglected and underutilised, extremely sporadically cultivated for food and feed, with almost no breeding strategies and often escaping from local agricultures into neighbouring wild flora. Still, numerous in situ and on-farm investigations confirm that L. cicera has a remarkable infraspecific diversity, which, along with the existing ex situ collections across the world, proves as a solid basis for its improvement and reintroduction. There are sufficient resources for both developing new advanced cultivars and maintaining the locally culti- vated and maintained landraces. Lathyrus cicera has a considerable potential for producing more than 8 t ha -1 of forage dry matter (hay) and around 3.6 t ha -1 of dry grain, with a dry matter crude protein content in both surpassing 250 g kg -1 , for a substantial reduction of the content of neurotoxin oxalyldiaminopropionic acid (ODAP), an enhanced resistance to various stress factors, such as drought, low temperatures, powdery mildew, pseudomonas, rust or crenate broomrape, for a safe inclusion into human diets and animal feeding and for various environment-friendly uses. Equally important for reintroducing L. cicera is the promotion of the currently rather rare regional folk customs and gastronomic festivals devoted to this cultivated plant, such as the Sagra della maracucciata, regularly celebrating maracuoccio, as it is called in the Chilen- tan dialect, in the Camerotan hamlet of Lentiscosa, in southwest Italy, with thousands of visitors from elsewhere and for more than a decade. Keywords Archaeobotany Á Characterisation Á Crop improvement Á Ecogeography Á Evaluation Á Ex situ conservation Á Genetic resources Á In situ preservation Á Lathyrus cicera Á Maracuccio Á On-farm knowledge Á Neglected cultivated plants K. Hammer Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research, Gatersleben, Germany K. Hammer O ¨ kologische Agrarwissenschaften, Universita ¨t Kassel, Witzenhausen, Germany G. Laghetti Á P. Direnzo Institute of Biosciences and BioResources, National Research Council, Bari, Italy A. Castelli Sergio Bonelli Editore, Milan, Italy A. Mikic ´(&) Institute of Field and Vegetable Crops, Maksima Gorkog 30, 21000 Novi Sad, Serbia e-mail: aleksandar.mikic@ifvcns.ns.ac.rs; aleksandar.mikich@gmail.com 123 Genet Resour Crop Evol https://doi.org/10.1007/s10722-018-0717-3