Anti-nutritional Factors in Some Grain Legumes

Grain legumes, such as soybean (Glycine max (L.) Merr.), pea (Pisum sativum L.), faba bean (Vicia faba L.), lupins (Lupinus spp.), common vetch (Vicia sativa L.) and grass pea (Lathyrus sativus L.), represent one of the most quality and least expensive solutions for a long-term demand for plant protein in animal husbandry. One of the limitations to an increased use of grain legumes as feed is the presence of diverse compounds in their grain, commonly referred to as anti-nutritional factors, that both decrease nutritive value of grain legumes and, if taken in larger amounts, cause health problems that may be fatal for both human and the animals. By this reason, breeding programmes of all grain legumes is aimed at decreasing the content of anti-nutritional factors to a safe extent. Breeding of soybean cultivars for reduced amount of antinutritive factors resulted in the development of Kunitz-free soybean cultivars, which are suitable for thermal processing at lower temperatures and during a shorter period of time. This is the way of saving energy and preserving valuable nutritional composition of soybean grain. As for other species, the most significant progress has been made in protein pea, where all modern cultivars have either low or very low content of various antinutritional factors. Among the improvements are also ‘zero-tannin’ cultivars in faba bean, with a wide utilization in both animal feeding and bread industry, lowtoxin common vetch cultivars, ‘sweet’ cultivars in lupins and low-ODAP cultivars in grass pea.