A Review on Quality Protein Maize (QPM) an Important Agroproduct for Food and Nutrition

Maize is the third most important cereal in India after wheat and rice. Maize is a good source of carbohydrate, fats, proteins and some of the important vitamins and minerals. Several million people derive their protein and calorie requirements from Maize. Traditional maize has a drawback of being deficient in two essential amino acids viz. lysine and tryptophan. this leads to poor net protein utilization and low biological value of traditional maize genotypes. This problem has solved the maize breeders by developing the quality protein maize (QPM) by incorporating opaque-2 mutant gene, which is particularly responsible for enhancing lysine and tryptophan content of maize protein. Quality protein maize looks and taste like normal maize with same higher yield potential, but it contains nearly twice the quality of essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which makes it rich in quality proteins. The majority of the population depends on cereals for their livlihood in most of the countries and maize is the staple cereal food throughout the world. Therefore it was realized to improve the biological value of protein in maize genotypes. For this purpose a new corn type known as Quality Protein Maize (QPM) was developed by lowering the concentration of zein by 30%. As a result, the concentration of two essential amino acids viz lysine and tryptophan in grain was increased in QPM genotypes as compared to normal grain maize genotypes. This study aims to focus the cultivation of QPM rather than normal Maize.