Evaluation of foxtail millet (Setaria italica (L.) Beauv.) Germplasm for folic acid content

Foxtail millet (Setaria italica (L.) Beauv.) is a potential climate resilient, C4 Panicoid crop. It is commonly known as Italian millet and is staple food crop grown in some parts of China, India and Japan. Nutrient composition of millets is higher than the average nutrient composition in major cereals (Muthamilarasan and Prasad, 2015). Research studies are lagging behind in nutrient profiling of millets. Hence, an experiment was done with one hundred genotypes of foxtail millet procured from ICRISAT mini core collection (Upadhyaya et al. 2011) for folic acid content. The range of values for these parameters ranged from 3.2-17.48mg/g. ISe 1767 recorded least amount of folic acid (3.2mg/g) whereas ISe 1387 recorded highest amount of it. The study also reveals great variability among the collection of foxtail millet accessions for folic acid that can be exploited to improve cultivars to meet the nutritional requirements of humans.