300 Handbook of herbs and spices
as Vitamin A, C and E. In fact, vitamin C was first purified from Capsicum fruits in
1928 by Hungarian biochemist Albert Szent Gyorgyi, which helped him to receive
the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine during 1937.
In this chapter, attempts have been made to describe in brief the taxonomic status
of pepper and elaborate innovative uses of carotenoids and capsaicinoids present in
the pepper fruits and their biosynthetic pathways. General cultural practices of growing
pepper under open field conditions have also been briefly described.
16.2 The genus Capsicum......................................................................
The genus Capsicum perhaps comes from the Latin word ‘capsa’, meaning chest or
box because of the shape of fruits, which enclose seeds very neatly, as in a box
(Berke and Shieh, 2000). The Capsicum (2n = 24) encompasses a diverse group of
plants producing pungent or non-pungent fruits. At present, it is widely accepted that
the genus consists of approximately 25 wild and five cultivated species. Based on the
gene flow through natural and conventional hybridization, the Capsicum species are
grouped in three species complexes (Table 16.1). Among the cultivated species, viz.,
C. annuum, C. frutescens, C. chinense, C. baccatum (var. baccatum), C. pubescens,
cultivation of C. annuum is the most widely spread all over the world. C. annuum
was domesticated in the highlands of Mexico and includes most of the Mexican chile
(syn. chilli), most of the chilli of Asia and Africa and sweet peppers of temperate
countries. However, due to the non-adaptability of C. annuum in lowland tropics of
Latin America, its cultivation was replaced by C. frutescens and C. chinense (Pickersgill,
1997). The cultivation of C. baccatum and C. pubescens is mostly restricted to Latin
American countries like Peru, Bolivia, Columbia and Brazil. In India also, although
C. annuum is most widely cultivated, C. frutescens, C. chinense and C. baccatum are
also grown in specific regions. Except for C. pubescens, wild forms of the remaining
four cultivated species are known.
All the five cultivated species of Capsicum are represented by genotypes with
pungent (hot pepper) or non-pungent (sweet pepper) fruits. Furthermore, these
species have huge variability for fruit size/shape and pungency and often genotypes
with similar fruit morphology exist across the species. Hence assigning a given
genotype to a specific cultivated species based on fruit size, shape and pungency is
difficult. Nonetheless, certain flower and fruit descriptors may be used to assign a
genotype to a cultivated species without much doubt (Table 16.2). Recently, molecular
markers associated with specific species within C. annuum the complex have been
developed.
Table 16.1 Three recognized species complexes of the genus Capsicum
Complex Species
C. annuum complex C. annuum L., C. frutescens L., C. chinense Jacq., C. chacoense
Hunz., C. galapagoense Hunz.
C. baccatum complex C. baccatum L., C. praetermissum Heiser & Smith, C. tovarii
C. pubescens complex C. pubescens* Ruiz & Pav., C. cardenasii Heiser & Smith, C. eximium
Hunz.
- Cultivated species.