High nutrition Pepper

Fruits of plants of the genus Capsicum, like sweet peppers and hot peppers are available in a wide variety of different colors like red, yellow, brown, and orange generally for fully matured fruits and green, white, lilac, and purple for non-mature "unripe" fruits.

Chlorophyll is the molecule that is called a photoreceptor. It is found in the chloroplasts of green pepper plants and is what makes pepper fruits green. The basic structure of a chlorophyll molecule is a porphyrin ring, coordinated to a central atom. This is very similar in structure to the heme group found in hemoglobin, except that in heme the central atom is iron, whereas in chlorophyll it is magnesium.

It is usually easy to tell when a food has significant amounts of chlorophyll, because chlorophyll provides the green color that is found in the green parts of the plants and in many of the fruits and vegetables that are consumed. These plants and foods would not be green without their chlorophyll, since chlorophyll pigments reflect sunlight at exact appropriate wavelengths for our eyes to detect them as green.

Research on the health benefits of chlorophyll has focused on the area of cancer. This research got underway when damage to genes by carcinogenic substances called aflatoxins, was found to be prevented by chlorophyllin, a derivative of chlorophyll. Although research is still in its early stage, prevention and treatment of liver cancer, skin cancer, and colon cancer are all being investigated in relationship to intake of chlorophyll-containing vegetables and supplementation with chlorophyllin.

The plant pigments lutein and zeaxanthin are antioxidants. A study conducted by the Journal of the American College of Nutrition in 2004 concluded that "There is a continuously growing body of evidence that suggests that lutein and zeaxanthin may contribute to the protection against several age-related diseases, including cataract and age-related macular degeneration as well as other diseases including dementia."

This invention describes p epper plants producing pepper fruits with enhanced green color. The pepper plants exhibit new physicochemical characteristics of the pepper fruit in relation with chlorophyll A & B, lutein as well as violaxanthin and exhibit a characteristic extreme dark green color at immature fruit stage. The trait relates to QTL alleles directing the expression of the pigment content of those pepper fruits and the molecular markers associated with these QTL alleles are disclosed.