To determine whether or not FT-IR spectroscopy could be used for taxonomic and metabolic discrimination of African yam lines, tuber samples from African and Asian yam species were subjected to FT-IR. Most remarkable spectral differences between African and Asian yams were found in the 1750-1700cm(-1) region, polysaccharide (1200-900cm(-1)) and protein/amide I and II (1700-1500cm(-1)) regions of FT-IR spectra. A hierarchical dendrogram based on partial least square-discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) of FT-IR data from 7 African yam species show phylogenetic relationship. In addition, the content of dioscin, a steroidal saponin found in yam tuber, was predicted using a PLS regression model with regression coefficient R(2)=0.7208 indicated that prediction model had average accuracy. Thus, considering these results we suggest that FT-IR combined with multivariate analysis could be applied as a novel tool for metabolic evaluation and high-throughput screening of African yam lines with higher content of dioscin.