Nutritional characterization of improved lines and cultivars of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.)

Chickpea (Cicerarietinum L.) is an important legume for food world safetybecause of its high nutritional value. The genetic improvement of adapted varieties aims to release new varieties withhigh qualitative, nutritional and esthetic quality (grains of big size, with beige color andshort cooking time) required by the consumption and the world trade. The important efforts displayedaim to limit the genetic erosion which threatens this legume, and will enlarge and diversify genetic resources of chickpea. This study is an attempt for nutritional characterizations of sixteen winter chickpea lines among which eleven are high yielding varieties and source of resistance to Ascochyta blight but have small size of grains (Kasseb (line12), Chétoui(line13), Bouchra (line14), Neyer (line15) and Béja1 (line16)). The evaluation of the genetic material revealed that the two lines 6 and 5 have the biggest size and weight of grains, capacity of hydration and inflation, high protein content, and ashort cooking time. The lines 6 and 5 were selected best lines of the collection for nutritional qualities. A genetic analysis of the characters studied confirms that improvement of chickpea quality is possible in early generations of breeding programs.