Abstract

Peanut (Arachis species) plants originated in South America where they have existed for thousands of years. Successively, peanut culture has been introduced in many African countries and was incorporated into local traditional food cultures. Numerous studies showed peanut nutritive importance and capacity to prevent several human diseases. The target of the present survey aimed to create a germplasm benchmark of peanut varieties in the north region of Côte d’Ivoire (West Africa country) since this plant is weakly studied in this geographic area. For this purpose, six peanut varieties were processed and pre and/or post-harvest measurements have been brought on seedlings. In addition, biochemical composition of peanut seed for each considered varieties were measured. Statistical analysis based on several R software functions showed a good quality of collected peanut data and proposed post-harvest parameters as an adequate factor clustering the present analyzed peanut varieties. Then, statistical analysis performed in this study, allowed to cluster analyzed peanut varieties in two different groups. Moreover, the same survey evidenced a strong agreement between both post-harvest and biochemistry parameters assessing the difference between the two detected peanut variety groups (p-value < 0.05). Finally, the findings exhibited protein, glucose as well as ash biochemistry parameters as decent indicators selecting and clustering the present managed peanut varieties (p-value <0.05). In conclusion, this study proved a methodology demarche suggesting the possibility to hypothesize peanut germplasm benchmark in the savanna region of Côte d'Ivoire.

Key words: Peanut (Arachis species) varieties, groundnut, pre and post harvesting parameters, biochemical composition.