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Featured project
The Smart Carbohydrate Centre
| Smart Carbohydrate Center |
| 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 Smart Carbohydrate Centre is a collaborative project between scientists at the John Innes Centre (JIC), Norwich and the National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB), Cambridge. Alison Smith and Kay Denyer (JIC) and Wayne Powell and Andy Greenland (NIAB) were awarded a grant under the BBSRC’s Crop Science Initiative to set up the Smart Carbohydrate Centre to uncover and exploit novel variation for starch properties in wheat and barley.
- The project will exploit a number of lines of barley known to have unusual starches. Flours or starches from these lines are of potential value in baking, brewing, functional foods, industrial and food applications of starch and bioethanol production.
- Our aim is to produce systematic information about the functional properties of these starches, identify the genes responsible and look for further variation for starch in barley and in wheat. We will generate new breeding lines of wheat and barley containing the novel 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 will have access to all of 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.
Background
The properties of the starch in cereal seeds are likely to influence profoundly the baking quality of flour, the quality of malt for brewing, the efficiency of conversion 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 and 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 there has been no systematic effort to evaluate 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 will overcome these problems. It will collect and characterise barley and wheat lines with altered starch, and provide information on starch properties to a consortium of end users. For starches that interest members of the consortium, the relevant genes will be identified and moved into pre-breeding lines that can be bulked up under UK agricultural conditions. Samples of starch or seeds for testing will be provided to members of the consortium. We hope to reach this point in three years. Lines that look commercially interesting at this stage will be fast-tracked into commercial breeding programmes, in close association with the relevant end-users.
Monogram Network Web Sites
Smart Carbohydrate CentreThe 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.
Wheat: the big pictureOn this website we describe the life cycle of WHEAT, from seed germination to harvest ripe with special emphasis on the development of the grain after fertilisation.
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| 17/01/2012 NEW Press Release: Breeding better grasses for food and fuel more ... |
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| 28/11/2011 Centenary of the founding of the Plant Breeding Institute more ... |
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