Nutritional composition in leaves of some mulberry varieties:- A comparative study

The silkworm derives nutritional requirement from mulberry leaves for their growth and development, variations on the components of mulberry leaves may have some influence in the growth and development of silkworm. The nutritional parameters of mulberry leaves and silk production are directly proportional to each other. The nutritional composition of mulberry leaves vary depending on the soil and other environmental factors of the locality, moreover the genotypic characteristics. An effort has been made to determine, identify and analyse, the nutritional composition of different varieties of mulberry leaves, namely S-13, S-146, S-1635, S-1, AR-12, AR-14, S-36, S-54, TR-10 and BR-2 mostly found in Lucknow region of Uttar Pradesh, India. The current paper deals with quantification of protein, carbohydrate, total carotenoids, chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b, total chlorophyll contents of different varieties of mulberry grown in this region. The quantitative determination of nutritional composition indicates that BR-2 variety contains significantly higher concentration of protein content (0.308 mg/ml), carotenoids (0.0334 mg/gm), along with S-36 variety containing significantly higher quantity of proteins (0.3029 mg/ml), chlorophyll a (0.0858 mg/gm), chlorophyll b (0.0329 mg/gm), total chlorophyll (0.1034 mg/gm) and total carotenoids (0.0479 mg/gm). The carbohydrate content of S-1635 variety (0.4341 mg/ml) was significantly found highest as compared to other varieties. The statistical data analyses showed that all the nutritional parameters are found to have highly significant differences between them (`p´<; 0.01). Finally S-36 and BR-2 varieties hence are regarded as suitable with consistent performance over many characters.