The availability of a reliable regeneration technique for the production of fertile plants may help in the breeding of Lathyrus sativus itself, while regenerating somatic hybrids might yield genotypes with the disease resistance from grass pea coupled with the grain quality from protein pea. These results, added to those obtained with pea (7), stress the interest of flow cytometry as an early screening strategy to avoid hyperhydricity in cultured tissues, and for the optimisation of plant regeneration in grain legumes