Buckwheat: A critical approach towards assessment of its potential as a super crop

Abstract

Buckwheat has attracted considerable interest amongst the global scientific community due to its nutritional and pharmaceutical properties. It is a low input crop whose cultivation has persisted through centuries of civilization in almost every country where cereals were cultivated. The crop is an important source of rutin, an important flavonoid which is known to have cardioprotective, vasoprotective, antihypertensive, anti-inflammation, cytoprotective and anti-diabetic properties. Grains of buckwheat are a rich source of protein with a balanced amino acid composition, gluten free flour, dietary fibre, vitamins, resistant starch, phytosterols, fagopyrins, fagopyritols and phenolic compounds. Buckwheat is a short season crop which completes its life cycle in 70-90 days and can grow in wide range of environmental conditions including marginal lands and rocky, poorly tilled soils. The protein content in buckwheat flour is higher than in commonly used cereals such as rice, wheat, millet, sorghum and maize. Buckwheat grain protein is rich in lysine and arginine, which are generally limiting in other cereals. Because of a low Lys/ Arg and Met/Gly ratio, buckwheat protein has strong hypolipidemic activity. While Buckwheat is considered as a healthy food because of its nutraceutical properties, low yields due to seed shattering because of pedicel breaking and heterozygosity due to self-incompatibility as a consequence of dimorphic heterostylism have always remained major problems in achieving large scale incorporation of common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) in the agricultural portfolio. The present review highlights the multicore potential of buckwheat as a super crop to meet the challenges of food and nutritional security.