In this era of ever-increasing world population, newer food and feed crops that have been hitherto neglected are gaining recognition. The rejection of such lesser-known food crops has been due not to any inferiority but to the lack of research resources in the place of origin and often to their being scorned as “poor people's plants.” The genus Chenopodium supplies tasty and nutritious leaves as well as pink- to cream-coloured edible seeds. Tolerance to cold, drought, and salinity and the high lysine content of the seed protein are the attractive features of quinoa (Chenopodiumquinoa), the most frequently consumed species in the Andean regions of South America, Africa, some parts of Asia, and Europe. This review compares and evaluates the nutritional and antinutritional constituents of the leaves and seeds of C. quinoa vis-à-vis their conventional counterparts and argues for the acceptance of this plant in human diets.

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( I -to 4-month-old plants) in grain types was also studied.

Karyotypic and feulgen microdensitometric measurements show that the most asymmetric karyotype is correlated with the lowest DNA amount and vice versa in seven annual species of Cicer. The 2C nuclear DNA amounts vary from 1.83 pg to 3.57 pg and the values within this range can be categorized into three groups, the means (1.83 pg, 2.59 pg, 3.41 pg) of which are separated by the regular intervals of 0.8 pg. The differences within the groups are insignificant while those between groups are significant, C. reticulatum, which is considered to be progenitor species of C arietinum, differs from the latter in having two satellite pairs instead of one and 22.3 per cent less DNA content. The possibility of such concrete changes occurring during domestication, and the fact that C. arietinum depicts uniform karyotype and DNA contents in its cultivars underlines the need to reconsider the issue of C. reticulatum as the wild ancestor of C. arietinum.