Product Description

Groundnut or peanut is an important legume nut known for its multifarious uses including oil production, direct human consumption as food and also animal consumption in the form of hay, silage and cake. Being a grain legume, peanut has an important nutritional value for human beings, and its nutritional value has been exploited for combating malnutrition in children. The breeding objectives in groundnut focus on increasing yield, incorporating resistance/tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses and improving oil and nutritional quality including safety of its consumption by humans and animals. However, limited genetic variability in the cultivated germplasm and difficulties in hybridisation have slowed down the progress in groundnut breeding. The wild relatives are considered as sources of several agriculturally important traits including resistance to pests and pathogens, tolerance to abiotic stresses and variable nutritional value. These resources have been used in groundnut breeding programmes for improving the above traits, simultaneously addressing the constraint of reproductive barrier in successful hybridisation arising due to different ploidy levels of A. hypogaea and its wild relatives. This has been achieved through different routes: the hexaploid pathway, two different diploid/tetraploid pathways and genetic engineering-based methods. Nonetheless, the use of wild introgressions in groundnut improvement programmes has not been up to the desired extent, and therefore concerted efforts for a large-scale generalised introgression programme are required.
Peanut also called groundnut, earthnut, or goober, legume of the pea family (Fabaceae), grown for its edible seeds. Native to tropical South America, the peanut was at an early time introduced to the Old World tropics. The seeds are a nutritionally dense food, rich in protein and fat. Despite its several common names, the peanut is not a true nut. As with other legumes, the plant adds nitrogen to the soil by means of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and is thus particularly valuable as a soil-enriching crop.