Martin Chiona

Orange Fleshed Sweetpotato: a Contributor to Health: Breeding Healthy Sweetpotatoes to Alleviate Vitamin a Deficiency Martin Chiona

Vitamin A deficiency is a serious public health problem in Zambia and the existing means for addressing the problem are inadequate. The problem is manifest especially in young children and lactating mothers. Sweetpotato is a potential crop for alleviating vitamin A deficiency as some of the genotypes contain high levels of ?-carotene recognised by the orange flesh. However, most of the genotypes grown in Zambia are white fleshed hence low in ?-carotene. The research presented in this book was conducted as a contribution to the alleviation of vitamin A deficiency in Zambia by bio fortification of sweetpotatoes. The goal of this research was to improve the quantity of ?-carotene of the high dry mass local sweetpotato cultivars through hybridisation with the high ?-carotene content introduced genotypes. Two high ?-carotene parents exhibited positive high general combining ability effects, indicating that additive gene effects were predominant in the inheritance of ?-carotene. Reciprocal mean squares were significant (p=0.01) for ?-carotene content. The estimate of narrow sense heritability of ?-carotene (20.9%) was much lower. These results suggest that genetic gains will be slow for