• Introduction
• Background
• The team
• The barley collection
• Starch characterisation
• Gene discovery
• Fast-track barley breeding
• Our approach in wheat
• Contacts and funding

Background

The properties of the starch in cereal seeds have a profound influence on attributes such as the baking quality of flour, the quality of malt for brewing, the efficiency of conversion of starch to ethanol, the health-promoting properties of derived food products and the industrial value of extracted starch.

Most commercial cultivars of wheat and barley have very similar starches. However, worldwide collections of wheat and barley contain lines with starches that differ radically from those of commercial cultivars in many respects, including

• granule size,
• gelatinisation temperature,
• paste- and gel- forming abilities
• digestibility.

This variation could be used to breed improved varieties of wheat and barley for various food and industrial purposes, but it is not presently being exploited. This is because most of the potentially interesting lines are unsuitable for UK agriculture. There has been no systematic effort to evaluate the functionality of the flour and starch from these lines, or to introduce these characters into UK lines that could be taken forward into breeding programmes.

The Smart Carbohydrate Centre aims to overcome these problems. It collects and characterises barley and wheat lines with altered starch.

This information is in turn provided to a Consortium of end users. For starches that interest members of the Consortium, the relevant genes are being identified and moved into pre-breeding lines that can be bulked up under UK agricultural conditions. Samples of starch or seeds from these lines will be provided to members of the Consortium for testing. We hope to reach this point in three years. Lines that are commercially interesting at this stage will be fast-tracked into commercial breeding programmes, in close association with the relevant end-users.

The Consortium includes representatives of cereal farmers, breeders, bakers, brewers, distillers, maltsters, millers and nutritionists.