Dissecting Proteomic Estimates for Enhanced Bioavailable Nutrition during Varied Stages of Germination and Identification of Potential Genotypes in Chickpea

Background: United Nations SDG-2 and SDG-3 pledges to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and reduce premature deaths of children persisting amongst 821 million people globally. Chickpeas, the second largest food legume in the world, are important due to dietary, therapeutic and health values since Roman times and are ideal source of protein, carbohydrate, minerals and β-carotene. Therefore, it is central to alleviate malnutrition and ensuring good health.
Methods: We conducted experiments during Rabi crop season 2018-19 and 2019-20 and studied proximate nutritional compositions such as protein, its bioavailability enhancement procedures, optimum sprouting stage and potential genotypes. The present series experiment as 6th one was undertaken to find out the impacts of varying seed seedlings germination stages at 0, 3 and 6 days on observed estimates of protein contents in 12 potential genotypes of chickpea including Pusa-256 as standard (control) check.
Result: We noticed erosion of reserved seed nutrients activating seedling growth and enhancing nutritional values, observed protein in the range of 18.96 to 28.69%, discovered 6 days sprouts giving highest digestible protein and identified genotypes BG-1092, ICC-11378, JG-74 as potential resources to be utilized in breeding programmes for harnessing their genetic potentials for enriching protein and other nutritional components.