Influence of growing season, location and planting time on some quality parameters of kabuli chickpea

Abstract

Variability in hundred seed weight (HSW), protein content (PC) and cooking time (CT) was determined in the world collection of kabuli chickpea (Cicer arietinum L) maintained at ICARDA. HSW varied from 8 to 67 g, PC from 143 to 270 g kg−1 (14.3 to 27%) and CT from 50 to 296 min. Over all observations a coefficient of correlation of 0.87 (P = 0.01) was found between HSW and CT. This was not maintained for genotypes of intermediate HSW (25–42 g per 100 seeds). Standard unit heritability was 0.96, 0.37 and 0.68 respectively for HSW, PC and CT, while broad sense heritability was 0.79 for HSW and 0.55 for PC indicating a surprisingly high degree of heritability of PC in the kabuli chickpea.

Growing season had a marked effect on HSW and a lesser effect on PC than did growing location, and genotype/season and genotype/location interactions were apparent in both HSW and PC. Since CT and HSW were highly correlated, CT was affected to the same extent as HSW by growing season and location, PC appeared to be the most stable of the three quality parameters, and several lines were identified which maintained a PC significantly higher than the population mean when grown on two locations over two seasons, with low within-genotype coefficients of variability. Compared with spring planting, winter planting decreased PC by 8 g kg−1 whereas HSW increased by 1.2 g per 100 seeds.