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

Introduction

The aim of the Smart Carbohydrate Centre is to uncover and exploit novel variation for starch properties in wheat and barley

The Centre is based around our collection of lines of barley with unusual starches. Flours or starches from these lines are of potential value in baking, brewing, functional foods, industrial and food-additive applications of starch, and bioethanol production.

Within the Centre, we are

• producing systematic information about the functional properties of these starches,
• mapping and characterizing the genes responsible for the unusual starches.
• looking for further variation in barley and in wheat.
• generating new breeding lines of wheat and barley containing these starches, for bulking up and commercial testing.

The Smart Carbohydrate Centre depends for its success on the formation of a consortium of end-users of barley and wheat. The consortium has access to the information and materials generated by the Centre. Members will evaluate and test the Centre’s outputs in an iterative fashion. The outcome, in three years, will be a breeding programme that will introduce novel, valuable functionalities into UK wheat and barley.

The Smart Carbohydrate Centre provides completely new resources for end-users and breeders of wheat and barley, paving the way for the development of new cultivars with improved or novel food and industrial value, and of new, renewable raw materials for industry.

The Centre was set up in 2007/8, with funding for three years from the BBSRC Crop Science Initiative