Produce quality of food legumes: Genotype (G), environment (E) and (GxE) considerations

Abstract

Food legume crops are grown in a wide range of environments on every continent. Investigations of the quality of pulses for human consumption can be classified as nutritional or culinary quality characters. Nutritional quality is usually described in terms of protein concentration, protein quality and the type and concentration of antinutritional factors. The marketplace in general does not determine the price of a pulse on its nutritional quality. In contrast, culinary quality is the major price-determining factor. Culinary traits include seed size, seed shape, seed coat colour, cotyledon colour, uniformity and purity. If pulses are used in industrial food manufacturing, characters such as thermal processing, splitting, or flour milling and attributes such as hydration coefficient, cooking time, texture, viscosity and flavour are important. Studies of the effects of genotype (G), environment (E), and GxE interaction on nutritional and culinary quality of chickpea, lentil, faba bean, pea and common bean indicate that many quality traits have not been thoroughly investigated. An analysis of variance can be used to distinguish between crossover and non-crossover GxE interactions. This type of analysis provides information on the strategies that will be most effective for the improvement of quality traits of food legumes.