Nutritional diversity of underutilized plant species collected from Aegean Region of Turkey
The objective of the present work was to evaluate variability for dry matter, protein and mineral N (nitrogen), P (phosphorus), K (potassium), Ca (calcium), Mg (magnesium) composition of nutritionally important and widely consumed wild edible plants in Aegean region of Turkey, and to assess their mineral diversity using multivariate analysis. The plant material comprises 17 edible plants collected from native found, the data were subject to analysis of variance, and a Pearson correlation test used to determine the correlations between dry matter, protein content and N, P, K, Ca, Mg composition. Principal component analysis was performed on the result of examine compositions and the factor loadings, eigenvalues and percentage of cumulative variance were calculated, the patterns of relationships among nutritive element were shown three-dimension scatter plot. Multivariate analysis revealed considerable variation for the most of concentration and explained 81.49% of total variation accounted for three PC axes. The data reveal that selected wild plant provide significant nutrition and exhibited great variability among the species. Although soil mineral concentration, availability, fertilization and environment may have influenced on nutrient accumulation in plant tissue, genetic variability is considerable influenced on mineral composition of plant.