Chickpea Plant

Chickpea (Cicer arietinium L.) is a self-pollinated, annual leguminous plant with a diploid chromosomes (2n = 2x = 16). The genome size of chickpea is ~740 Mbp (Arumuganathan and Earle, 1991). Chickpea is a member of Leguminosae family, which included 18,000 species and is grouped into 650 genera (Varshney et al., 2009). Chickpea is a rich and cheap source of protein in comparison to animal protein for a vegetarian diet, which can help people to improve the nutritional quality and diversity of their food. Its pod covers and seed coats are used as a fodder. Due to its global importance, the number of chickpea growing countries has increased considerably during the past three decades. Chickpea is currently world second most important grain legume after common beans. In 2013, globally chickpea growing area is recorded as 13.5 million hectare (mha) with an annual production of 13.1 million tons (MT). The major chickpea

It requires cooler and longer winter season and hence are more suited to northern India. Chickpea is also known as gram, Bengal gram and garbanzo beans. Based on the seed colour and geographical distribution, chickpea is grouped into two types: Desi and kabuli chickpea (Jambunathan R and Singh U, 1980) (Fig.1.1). Desi chickpea have brown, black and green colour and are cultivated in 85% of global chickpea fields (South and East Asia, Iran, Ethiopia, and Australia). On the other hand, kabuli chickpea are white to cream colour and are commonly cultivated in Mediterranean regions, West Asia, North Africa, and North America (Frimpong et al., 2009). The major difference between both the seed falls in term of the quantity and quality of seed dietary fiber components. The seed weight of desi chickpea ranged between 0.1 to 0.3 gm and for kabuli it is 0.2 to 0.6 gm (Jukanti et al.,