Nutritional profiling and antioxidant assessment of Indian and exotic lentil accessions

Abstract

A study involving a very diverse set of 96 lentil (Lens culinaris Medikus. culinaris) genotypes including germplasm lines from India and ICARDA, Mediterranean landraces, advanced breeding lines and released varieties from India was conducted to evaluate the genotypes for protein and zinc contents, anti-nutritional traits (phenol and flavonoid) and antioxidant capacity to identify the promising lines. ANOVA indicated highly significant variations for the studied traits among the genotypes. Protein and zinc contents were recorded in the range of 18.61 to 27.77% and 27.4 to 87.3 mg/kg with an average value of 24.29% and 56.83 mg/kg, respectively. Considerable variations were recorded for total phenolic content which ranged from 4.52 to 21.67 mg GAE/ g. The total flavonoid content varied from 2.65 to 23.48 mg QE/g. Genotypes IC 262839, P 8115, LC 282896 recorded high protein and zinc contents and good antioxidant capacity with low to medium total phenol and flavonoid contents. Among the released varieties, PL04, PL06 and PL02 showed very good nutritional value and modest antioxidant capacity. Interestingly, protein content was found negatively correlated with anti-oxidant capacity (r = -0.22) and total flavonoid content (r = -0.15), whereas total flavonoid content was found positively correlated with antioxidant capacity (r = 0.55) and total phenol content (r = 0.24) but negatively correlated with zinc content (r = -0.12). The promising accessions identified in this study can be utilized for developing nutritionally rich lentil genotypes and varieties with balanced anti-nutritional profile to serve the resource poor and health-conscious population.