Screening for Zn & Fe content and its bioavailability in Common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

Abstract

Common bean is one of the most important legume crops grown worldwide. Micronutrients like Zinc and Iron are among the important minerals that are required in the diet to fulfil the nutritional needs of people. Therefore present study was conducted to identify lines showing higher content for micronutrients in common bean. A set of 96 lines were collected and evaluated for a variety of morphological traits and based on the preliminary trait evaluations and phenotyped for nutrient content using Diacid method of Zn and Fe estimation. The lines showed a normal distribution with significance level (p-value) greater than 0.05. The ANOVA analysis for the 96 bean accessions revealed significant difference for all parameters, (p≤ 0.01), the mineral content for both Fe and Zn has shown significant difference among the Common bean lines, described diversity of micronutrient content in dry seeds was found among the common bean lines with a high level of diversity for each, but several accessions with lower levels of nutrients were also identified. A high variation of Fe content was identified in the genotypes and a good normal distribution for Zn content was observed in germplasm. The screening deciphered the mean values identifying cultivars with high amounts of Fe and Zn could contribute significantly to improvements of micronutrient of people depending on the common bean as major component of their diet and the germplasm identified can be used as breeding lines for varietal improvement. The current estimation, therefore, was conducted to evaluate variability of iron and zinc concentrations among common bean germplasm grown at SKUAST-J, Jammu & Kashmir.