Characterization of Spanish chickpea genotypes (Cicer arietinum L.): proximate, mineral, and phenolic compounds composition

Chickpea is the world’s second most widely grown pulse. This legume will become increasingly important due to its natural drought and heat tolerance ability, and its capacity to fix atmospheric N 2 in symbiosis with rhizobia what makes this pulse a low-water and carbon fingerprint crop. The aim of this study was to assess the nutritional value, the mineral composition, and the phenolic compound profiles of ten Spanish chickpea genotypes. Seed morphological characteristics were also determined as useful traits for analyzing plant biodiversity. Most of these advanced lines and/or recombinant inbred lines (RILs) were derived from intraspecific crosses among kabuli-type chickpeas genotypes. The variety Kasin and two RILs, namely 5-RIL-33 and 5-RIL-92, shared the same parental lines, one of them from India (WR315) of desi type. Only one genotype (5-RIL-33) has colored grains and pink flowers (common desi-type traits). These three genotypes were resistant to both ascochyta blight [ Ascochyta rabiei (Pass.) Labr] and Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. ciceris race 5. The protein content of all genotypes was higher than 20% with some outstanding lines having > 25%. Other functional components such as crude fat, fiber, and carbohydrates contents and minerals were broadly uniform across the studied material. The analysis of the phenolic compounds on methanolic seed extracts reveals common features as the presence of gentisic and 4-hydroybezoic acids, besides l -glutamic, citric, and succinic organic acids. In contrast, some compounds such as gallic acid, gallocatechin, and rutin are exclusively present in the colored 5-RIL-33 line, in addition to the reference Apulian black chickpea variety.