ICS Flavour Project
To assess the quality attributes of the Imperial College Selections
Generating more information on the ICS accession group will lead to a new purpose for conservation and inclusion of this accession group in local, regional and international cocoa breeding programmes. The following are some broad justifications for further research into the ICS accession group:
The ICS accession group has long been recognised and used by breeders as a source of traits of economic importance.
The ICS group as a whole provides one of the best available source of cocoa with traditional Trinitario flavour. While quality aspects of a few individuals have (e.g. ICS 1 and ICS 95) have been studied in greater detail, little is known about quality of the majority of ICS clones in the collection.
The ICS accession group has not been used to the fullest advantage in local, regional and international breeding programmes since the majority of quality traits have never been studied.
The full complement of the ICS accession group no longer exists and there is a potential threat of further genetic erosion before potentially valuable traits are exploited.
The narrow genetic base of current commercial cultivars validates the need to introduce genetic variability. A comprehensive analysis comparing cacao genetic diversity as a whole with all the remaining ICS clones has not been done and the germplasm can be a source of desirable genes for economically important traits in global breeding programmes.
The completion of the CFC/ICCO/INIAP “Project to establish physical, chemical and organoleptic parameters to differentiate between fine or flavour and bulk cocoa” from 2001 to 2005 led to the capacity to achieve highly sensitive and accurate profiling of the flavour attributes of cocoa. This includes the ability to define and recognise flavour traits by several trained panels. This “analytical” tool is now available to profile the ICS clones.
