Worldwide, since ages and nowadays, traditional medicine is well known, owing to its biodiversity, which immensely contributed to the advancement and development of complementary and alternative medicines. There is a wide range of spices, herbs, and trees known for their medicinal uses. Chilli peppers, a vegetable cum spice crop, are bestowed with natural bioactive compounds, flavonoids, capsaicinoids, phytochemicals, phytonutrients, and pharmacologically active compounds with potential health benefits. Such compounds manifest their functionality over solo-treatment by operating in synergy and consortium. Co-action of these compounds and nutrients make them potentially effective against coagulation, obesity, diabetes, inflammation, dreadful diseases, such as cancer, and microbial diseases, alongside having good anti-oxidants with scavenging ability to free radicals and oxygen. In recent times, capsaicinoids especially capsaicin can ameliorate important viral diseases, such as SARS-CoV-2. In addition, capsaicin provides an ability to chilli peppers to ramify as topical agents in pain-relief and also benefitting man as a potential effective anesthetic agent. Such phytochemicals involved not only make them useful and a much economical substitute to wonder/artificial drugs but can be exploited as obscene drugs for the production of novel stuffs. The responsibility of the TRPV1 receptor in association with capsaicin in mitigating chronic diseases has also been justified in this study. Nonetheless, medicinal studies pertaining to consumption of chilli peppers are limited and demand confirmation of the findings from animal studies. In this artifact, an effort has been made to address in an accessible format the nutritional and biomedical perspectives of chilli pepper, which could precisely upgrade and enrich our pharmaceutical industries towards human well-being.

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The experiments were undertaken at ‘C’ Block Farm of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Kalyani, Nadia, West Bengal, India during 2017–18 and 2018–19 to study the genetic variability, heritability and genetic gain of 23 onion genotypes. Twenty open-pollinated varieties, two hybrid varieties were taken under consideration with one variety taken as standard check. Characters like number of leaves at 30 DAT and 90 DAT, neck thickness, number of scales per bulb, bolters, average weight of 10 bulbs, vitamin C content, dry matter, TSS, phenol content, severity of purple blotch disease, total yield and marketable yield expressed high heritability along with high genetic gain. These traits were least influenced by environmental effect, so, additive genetic effect might be the influential factor for expression of such traits. Traits with such high heritability values gives clear indication that the variability observed was mainly under genetic control and offers ample scope and opportunities to conduct selection based on phenotypic performances for improvement in future onion breeding programme. For traits with moderate heritability viz., double bolters, pyruvic acid, total sugar, storage loss, selection would be less effective in these traits but can still be taken up. Characters plant height at 90 DAT and unmarketable yield, which expressed low heritability are governed by non-additive genes and therefore, hybridization between diverse parents will be the best strategy for their improvement.

Genetic divergence study, using Mahalanobis D 2 statistics, was conducted in twenty-three onion genotypes for fourteen characters. Among the characters studied; total yield, phenol, pyruvic acid, vitamin C content contributed maximum towards divergence. The maximum number of genotypes was grouped into cluster VI while the minimum was in cluster VIII. The intra-cluster distance varied from 0.00 (cluster VIII) to 14.618 (cluster IV). The maximum inter-cluster distance (32.763) was found between cluster V and VIII, indicating that hybridization can be taken up between the genotypes of these two clusters for obtaining superior recombinants or transgressive segregants. The genotype of cluster VIII showed superior performance for the plant height at 60 DAT, polar and equatorial diameter, number of scales per bulb, total sugar and dry matter percentage, TSS, vitamin C, phenol and pyruvic acid content and total yield. The genotypes of cluster III were found to be superior for the number of days to maturity. Thus, based on the diversity pattern and mean performances, the genotypes viz., Sukhsagar from cluster VIII; Arka Bheem and Arka Niketan from cluster VI; Bhima Raj from cluster II and HO-3 from cluster V would be the best choice as parents for future hybridization programs.

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