Variability for Iron and Zinc Related Traits in the Mini Core Collection of Valencia Peanut.

Over 3 billion people around the world suffer from Fe and Zn deficiency, which results in an enormous negative socioeconomic cost to the society. Of recent, few peanut germplasm and breeding lines with high grain Fe and Zn have been reported. One hundred twenty five accessions of Valencia peanut mini core collection along with five controls ('KS1, KS2, KS4, KKU40 and KKU60') were evaluated for two seasons (2012 rainy and 2012/2013 postrainy seasons in a randomized complete block with four replications at Khon Kaen University, Thailand. A 200 g matured pod sample was used to estimate shelling percentage. Sound mature kernels were provided to the Central Analytical Services Laboratory, ICRISAT, Patancheru, for chemical analysis. Care was taken to avoid contamination of seeds with dust, trash, or other foreign material. The seed samples were dried,powdered, and digested using the tri-acid mixture to determine the Fe and Zn contents by atomic absorption spectrophotometry (Sahrawat et al., 2002). The statistical analysis of the data was done following the residual maximum likelihood method (REML) developed by Patterson and Thompson (1963) on SAS®. The mean values of the five nutritional traits (Zn, Fe, oil and oleic content and O:L ratio) for each of the accessions were calculated using a least-mean square approach on SAS® on the unbalanced data set. For each trait of the one hundred and twenty-five accessions, the p-value was calculated comparing the accession to its relative control (Gangapuri ICG2738 for the ICRISAT accessions and Val-C for USA accessions). The O:L ratio was reported to have a trial average of 1.42 and 1.44 for the US and ICRISAT accessions respectively, with values between 1.04 and 2.29. Lastly, the oleic content (%) was found to be significantly superior in one US (NM047) and three ICRISAT (ICG115, ICG1142 and ICG3673) accessions. The oleic acid content in the oil ranged from 41.05% to 56.80% with an average value of 46.78%.