ABSTRACT
Major limiting factors of wide consumption of cowpea in day today diet include poor digestibility and the presence of anti-nutritional factors. Whole and dehulled seeds of eight improved cowpea lines grown in N’Djamena and Bebedjia (Chad) were analysed for four antinutritional factors contents (total phenols, tannins, flavonoids, phytates) and antioxidant activity, in order to assess the variability and the effect of decortication. In each locality, the experimental design was a triplicated randomly complete block design. Standard methods were used to evaluate these biochemical traits. The results showed a wide variability among genotypes for these traits in whole and dehulled seeds. In average, the decortication reduced polyphenols, tannins, flavonoids and phytate contents by 72.3%, 64%, 48.6% and 30.1% respectively. The dehulling also reduced the antioxidant activity by 42.25%. Dehulling appeared as a proper processing method to reduce anti-nutritional factors and improve the bioavailability of nutrients, especially when cowpeas are used as food for infants and children.

ABSTRACT
Yield is one of the most important component in breeding program and it depends on the relationship between plant traits. Twenty (20) hybrids of tropical maize were evaluated to investigate the relation between various traits and yield at the research and development farm of the faculty of Agriculture, Nasarawa State University Keffi, Nigeria. Two environment were used for this experiment which include 2021 for non-stress and 2022 for stressed and the experiment was laid out in a complete randomized block design with three replications. The result showed significant difference among the studied traits exception for Days to anthesis, Days to maturity, Protein content and Days maturity for stress and non-stressed respectively. Correlation analysis suggest that there is a perfect relationship between Days to silking and Days to anthesis (0.98) for non-stress and a moderate relationship (0.55) under stressed environment while there is a moderate negative correlation between Days to silking and Protein content (0.52) for stress condition.

ABSTRACT
This study was aimed to examine the effect of plumage colour genes on the body measurements and heat tolerant traits of indigenous chicken. A total of two hundred (200) adult chicken with different plumage colours comprising of black, white, red, brown and grey of both sexes reared by smallholder farmers with similar management system in Lafia, Nasarawa state, Nigeria were randomly sampled. Data were collected randomly at five (5) different locations in Lafia as thus: Kwandere, Shabu, Sabon Pegi, Tudun Gwandara and Tudun Amba respectively. Six body traits and four heat tolerant traits were measured on each bird: body length, breast circumference, thigh circumference, foot length, total leg length, wing length and Body temperature, Rectal temperature, pulse rate and respiratory rate. There was significant difference (P<0.05) for thigh circumference. The highest values for thigh circumference was observed for the white and grey plumage coloured chicken although not significantly different for those of brown plumage coloured. No significant differences were observed for the body length, breast circumference, wing length, foot length and total leg length for all the plumage coloured chicken. There was significant difference (P<0.05) for respiratory rate and heat stress index. The highest respiratory rate and heat stress index was observed for the white plumage coloured chicken. The white plumage coloured chicken were thermally stressed due to their inability to absorbed and withstand heat. No significant differences were observed for the remaining four plumage colours. Higher values of thigh circumference are the characteristics of meatiness in chicken. The coloured plumage chicken (Black, red, brown and grey) from this study possess the ability to better survive and adapt to heat stress due to their tendencies to absorbed heat compared to their white plumage coloured counterpart.