Abstract
Several kinds of beans, such as soybean, pea, red bean, kidney bean, cowpea, peanut and the like, were analysed with regard to fatty acid composition of their oil by gaschromatography. In particular, the variation of composition within the species of “soybean” was studied by using 26 varieties of soybean.
The method of analysis employed is a vector technique dealing simultaneously with multivariantes, where the vector sum of the segments, which is obtainable by plotting the concentration of each component on the corresponding independent axis, is assumed to represent the pattern of the composition. Then, the angle θ between two vector sums, A (a1, a2, …, an) and B (b1, b2, …, bn), is given by the expression cosθ=∑aibi/√∑ai2√∑bi2
and this cosθ is considered to be a measure of the degree of resemblance between the two groups from which the two sums had been derived.
By taking for oleic, linoleic, stearic, and palmitic acids as characteristic components, the variation of fatty acid composition within a species of soybean was found to be too small to evaluate the effect of variation of the species.
Moreover, it was found that the resemblance of pattern of fatty acid composition among beans to the soybean (average composition) decreased in the following order : horse bean, pea, red bean, cowpea, kidney bean and peanut, while the pattern of peanut was considerably different from that of kidney bean.
