Effects of Altitudinal Gradient on Physicochemical and Rheological Potential of Quinoa Cultivars

Abstract

The protein, carbohydrate, and fat characteristics of quinoa grains reflect in their techno-functional potential. This aspect has been little studied in quinoa, while some physicochemical and rheological characteristics have been generalized for all cultivars under all primary production conditions. The aim of this research is to determine the agro-industrial potential of different quinoa cultivars evaluated under different environments through physicochemical and rheological responses. This study has a factorial design with a first level corresponding to cultivars and a second level to production zones. The results showed that the cultivars present high compositional variability. It was also found that the altitudinal gradient changes protein and starch composition, protein secondary structure, and starch structural conformation. In addition, significant variations were found in viscosity, breakdown, and dispersion setback for all treatments. However, there were no differences between treatments before heating/cooling and after heat treatment.

Diversity of quinoa genetic resources for sustainable production: A survey on nutritive characteristics as influenced by environmental conditions

“…The protein content of the Danish cultivar "Puno" was described in at least seven studies. The majority of the results were quite consistent in diverse environments (USA, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Colombia), ranging between 13 and 15% (Aluwi et al, 2017;Sobota et al, 2020;De Bock et al, 2021b;Garcia-Parra et al, 2022). On the other hand, (Garcia-Parra et al, 2021) evaluated slightly reduced protein content, reaching almost 12% in "Puno" cultivated in Colombia.…”

“…Despite that, this genotype reached analogous values (13-15%) in the cultivation conditions of Ethiopia (Agza et al, 2018), Morocco (Mhada et al, 2020), Belgium (De Bock et al, 2021b, USA (Aluwi et al, 2017), and Germany (Prager et al, 2018). Besides this, slightly higher protein content (above 15%) was observed under cultivation in Poland (Sobota et al, 2020) and Colombia (Garcia-Parra et al, 2022). In addition, Reguera et al (2018) reported higher protein content for "Titicaca" cultivated in Chile compared to Spain, which follows the results of Granado-Rodriguez et al (2021a), reaching comparable values in mean protein content averaged for three cultivation years.…”

“…Experiments conducted with genotypes cultivated in Spain resulted in decreased carbohydrate content in a growing season with a mean temperature of approximately 25 • C, in contrast to a growing season with a mean temperature lowered by 5 • C (Matías et al, 2021). This was also supported by Garcia-Parra et al (2022), indicating the highest carbohydrate content (65.5%) in cultivars grown in a cold climate.…”

“…In terms of oil production, quinoa performed well in a temperate climate since heat stress reduced average oil content by almost 30% (Garcia-Parra et al, 2022). Curti et al (2018) found strong interactions between cultivar and sowing date, related to the various photo-thermal conditions during sowing.…”

“…Lipid content is, among other factors, strongly affected by genotype (Curti et al, 2020;Garcia-Parra et al, 2022). Since the primary lipid storage is located in the embryo, embryo size may also correlate to overall seed lipid content (De Bock et al, 2021b).…”