Assessing the cooking and quality traits diversity in the seeds of faba bean germplasm

Faba bean is protein-enriched legume crop consumed in the form of pods, and cooked seeds and is a part of the traditional food of many Mediterranean countries. It shows variations in its phenotypes, especially in seed size and color. Therefore, it is very important to investigate faba bean genotypes having less cooking time. Keeping this in view, a total of 399 faba bean accessions including three commercial varieties were obtained from International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and Aegean Agricultural Research Institute National Gene Bank for the investigation of cooking traits variations. The field experiments were conducted according to the augmented block design in three provinces (Sivas, Adana, and Izmir) of Turkiye for two consecutive years (2017 and 2018). A good range of variations was observed for all studied traits and the mean cooking time was 114.16 min. Izmir10 had better cooking properties due to its shorter cooking time than other cultivars and landraces. Higher values of the swelling index revealed the higher swelling ability of Balikesir74. Correlation analysis was performed and swelling capacity showed significant and positive correlations with swelling index and hydration capacity at a significance level of p = 0.05. As this germplasm was collected from 45 provinces, the landrace from Sanliurfa reflected minimum cooking time and maximum swelling capacity. Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed and the 1st five PCs accounted for a total of 100.00% variations. Biplot analysis resulted in a total of 63.02% variations and the studied germplasm was divided based on cooking time, hydration capacity, and swelling capacity. Izmir10 showed minimum cooking time, it should be also used as a candidate parent to develop faba bean cultivars requiring lesser cooking time to save time and energy. We believe that the results presented herein will be very helpful for the faba bean breeding community interested in quality and cooking traits.