Legume in the context of "Lathyrus"

Vachellia erioloba, the camel thorn, also known as the giraffe thorn, mokala tree, or Kameeldoring in Afrikaans, still more commonly known as Acacia erioloba, is a tree of southern Africa in the family Fabaceae. Its preferred habitat is the deep dry sandy soils in parts of South Africa, Botswana, the western areas of Zimbabwe and Namibia. It is also native to Angola, south-west Mozambique, Zambia and Eswatini. The tree was first described by Ernst Heinrich Friedrich Meyer and Johann Franz Drège in 1836. The camel thorn is a protected tree in South Africa.

The tree can grow up to 20 metres high. It is slow-growing, very hardy to drought and fairly frost-resistant. The light-grey colored thorns reflect sunlight, and the bipinnate leaves close when it is hot. The wood is dark reddish-brown in colour and extremely dense and strong. It is good for fires, which leads to widespread clearing of dead trees and the felling of healthy trees. It produces ear-shaped pods, favoured by many herbivores including cattle. The seeds can be roasted and used as a substitute for coffee beans.

A staple food, food staple, or simply staple, is a food that is eaten often and in such quantities that it constitutes a dominant portion of a standard diet for an individual or a population group, supplying a large fraction of energy needs and generally forming a significant proportion of the intake of other nutrients as well. For humans, a staple food of a specific society may be eaten as often as every day or every meal, and most people live on a diet based on just a small variety of food staples. Specific staples vary from place to place, but typically are inexpensive or readily available foods that supply one or more of the macronutrients and micronutrients needed for survival and health: carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals and vitamins. Typical examples include grains (cereals and legumes), seeds, nuts and root vegetables (tubers and roots). Among them, cereals (rice, wheat, oat, maize, etc.), legumes (lentils and beans) and tubers (e.g. potato, taro and yam) account for about 90% of the world's food calorie intake.

Early agricultural civilizations valued the crop foods that they established as staples because, in addition to providing necessary nutrition, they generally are suitable for storage over long periods of time without decay. Such nonperishable foods are the only possible staples during seasons of shortage, such as dry seasons or cold temperate winters, against which times harvests have been stored. During seasons of surplus, wider choices of foods may be available.

The peanut (Arachis hypogaea), also known as the groundnut, goober (US), goober pea, pindar (US) or monkey nut (UK), is a legume crop grown mainly for its edible seeds, contained in underground pods. It is widely grown in the tropics and subtropics by small and large commercial producers, both as a grain legume and as an oil crop. Geocarpy is atypical among legumes, which led botanist Carl Linnaeus to name the species hypogaea, from Greek 'under the earth'.

The peanut belongs to the botanical family Fabaceae (or Leguminosae), commonly known as the legume, bean, or pea family. Like most other legumes, peanuts harbor symbiotic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in root nodules, which improve soil fertility, making them valuable in crop rotations.

An endosymbiont or endobiont is an organism that lives within the body or cells of another organism. Typically, the two organisms are in a mutualistic relationship. Examples are nitrogen-fixing bacteria (called rhizobia), which live in the root nodules of legumes, single-cell algae inside reef-building corals, and bacterial endosymbionts that provide essential nutrients to insects.

Endosymbiosis played key roles in the development of eukaryotes and plants. Roughly 2.3 billion years ago an archaeon (likely within the Asgard superphylum) absorbed an alphaproteobacterium through phagocytosis, that eventually became the mitochondria that provide energy to almost all living eukaryotic cells. Approximately 1 billion years ago, some of those cells absorbed cyanobacteria that eventually became chloroplasts, organelles that produce energy from sunlight. Approximately 100 million years ago, a lineage of amoeba in the genus Paulinella independently engulfed a cyanobacterium that evolved to be functionally synonymous with traditional chloroplasts, called chromatophores.

Nitrogen fixation is a chemical process by which molecular dinitrogen (N
₂) is converted into ammonia (NH
₃). It occurs both biologically and abiologically in chemical industries. Biological nitrogen fixation or diazotrophy is catalyzed by enzymes called nitrogenases. These enzyme complexes are encoded by the Nif genes (or Nif homologs) and contain iron, often with a second metal (usually molybdenum, but sometimes vanadium).

Some nitrogen-fixing bacteria have symbiotic relationships with plants, especially legumes, mosses and aquatic ferns such as Azolla. Looser non-symbiotic relationships between diazotrophs and plants are often referred to as associative, as seen in nitrogen fixation on rice roots. Nitrogen fixation occurs between some termites and fungi. It occurs naturally in the air by means of NO_x production by lightning.

Clovers, also called trefoils, are plants of the genus Trifolium (from Latin tres 'three' and folium 'leaf'), consisting of about 300 species of flowering plants in the legume family Fabaceae originating in Europe. The genus has a cosmopolitan distribution with the highest diversity in the temperate Northern Hemisphere, but many species also occur in South America and Africa, including at high altitudes on mountains in the tropics.

They are small annual, biennial, or short-lived perennial herbaceous plants, typically growing up to 30 cm (12 in) tall. The leaves are trifoliate (rarely, they have more or fewer than three leaflets; the more (or fewer) leaflets the leaf has, the rarer it is; see four-leaf clover), with stipules adnate to the leaf-stalk, and heads or dense spikes of small red, purple, white, or yellow flowers; the small, few-seeded pods are enclosed in the calyx. Other closely related genera often called clovers include Melilotus (sweet clover) and Medicago (alfalfa or Calvary clover).

Vicia faba, commonly known as the broad bean, fava bean, or faba bean, is a species of vetch, a flowering plant in the pea and bean family Fabaceae. It is widely cultivated as a crop for human consumption, and also as a cover crop. Varieties with smaller, harder seeds that are fed to horses or other animals are called field bean, tic bean or tick bean. This legume is commonly consumed in many national and regional cuisines.

Some people suffer from favism, a hemolytic response to the consumption of broad beans, a condition linked to a metabolic disorder known as G6PDD. Otherwise the beans, with the outer seed coat removed, can be eaten raw or cooked. With young seed pods, the outer seed coat can be eaten, and in very young pods, the entire seed pod can be eaten.

Pea is a pulse or fodder crop, but the word often refers to the seed or sometimes the pod of this flowering plant species. Peas are eaten as a vegetable.

Carl Linnaeus gave the species the scientific name Pisum sativum in 1753 (meaning cultivated pea). Some sources now treat it as Lathyrus oleraceus; however the need and justification for the change is disputed. The name "Pea" is also used to describe other edible seeds from the Fabaceae such as the pigeon pea (Cajanus cajan), the cowpea (Vigna unguiculata), the seeds from several species of Lathyrus, and Sturt's desert pea (Swainsona formosa).