Phenotypic variability of cowpea genotypes for immature seed harvesting

Abstract

Seed color, brightness and texture are important aspects for the consumption of immature beans. This study aimed to estimate the phenotypic variability among thirty cowpea genotypes for immature seed harvesting, in order to guide breeding programs. The experiment was carried out in a randomized blocks design, with three replications. The evaluated traits were immature seeds yield, pods and dry seeds production, number of immature pods, 100-immature seeds weight, immature pods length, number of seeds per immature pod, cooking time, harvesting period of immature pods, seed color, pod color, plant growth habit, opening of immature pods, seed threshing from immature pods, cultivation value and seed browning after threshing. Anova and three clustering methods were applied: UPGMA using the Jaccard coefficient of similarity; modified Tocher method based on the Gower algorithm; and k-means. All the analyses were performed based on the variable means of experiments evaluated in six environments. A statistically significant phenotypic variability was observed among all the quantitative traits. Discrepancies occurred in the accessions grouping and number of clusters. The accession BRS Acauã, in one group, and P508 and PCCR3F6L15, in other groups, showed a good quality for immature grain harvesting, were consistently grouped into different clusters and are recommended for use as parents in the development of new cultivars.

Combining ability of cowpea genotypes for green grain production

“…Cowpea is one of the growing food sources in tropical and subtropical regions (Kebede & Bekeko, 2020), especially in Africa, Latin America, part of Asia, and in the United States of America (Xiong et al, 2016;Narli & Ozcan, 2022), where it is used as a protein source for humans (Amusa et al, 2021) and animals (Amusa et al, 2021). This species can be consumed as dry grains (Tomaz et al, 2022), as a source of starch for the food industry (Acevedo et al, 2022), or as green grains (Aquino et al, 2021).…”

“…In this scenario, the growing increase of the green bean market has broadened the global demand for new cultivars. However, developing new cowpea genotypes for green grain production depends on overcoming challenges such as the scarce available information about this species (Aquino et al, 2021). The prospection for developing new cowpea varieties consists of combining desirable alleles from various previously selected germplasms and recombining them to obtain superior genotypes (Rocha et al, 2014;Reyes et al, 2022).…”

“…The variability identified among cowpea genotypes for grain and pod traits by the test of means was also reported by other authors for dry grains (Gomes Filho et al, 2017;Gomes et al, 2018), with scarce information available about green grains. Although the commercialization of immature cowpea seeds (green grains) is expressive in the Northeast region, there are no recommendations of cultivars identified for this specific purpose (Aquino et al, 2021). In this scenario, the presence of variability is essential to identify superior genotypes.…”