Developing enhanced breeding methodologies for oats for human health and nutrition

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The demand for high quality food grade oats is increasing annually, driven by its proven health benefits and by product development by the milling and cereals industries. Despite an expanding market, the oat crop is facing increasing competition from other arable crops and that is impacting on the UK oat area grown. This project will apply the latest genetic tools and resources, including genomic selection, to improve key traits that will increase the production and utilisation of oats, and to enhance grain yield, quality and composition. These are increasingly important traits for the UK oat milling industry to fully exploit the nutritional characteristics of the oat grain and key economic drivers for product development. Optimal strategies for high throughput phenotyping and genotyping will be developed. We will establish an efficient high throughput genotyping platform for use across the breeding programme. The advantages of genomic selection over conventional breeding approaches for defined traits will be determined and practical limits established for the use of GS on a wider scale. It will use a range of unique genetic material to dissect the genetic and environmental factors contributing to yield variation and use that information in an innovative oat breeding programme. Breeding programme populations will be used to extend the range of available marker-trait assays to improve selection efficiency in early generations and ensure uniformity in late generations. Phenotyping of key traits concerned with yield, milling quality and with human health and nutrition will be conducted and the impact of changing grain quality characters (beta-glucan or starch content/type) determined. GS results will be validated and gain compared with conventional and MAS approaches on the same populations. This will dramatically increase the efficiency of breeding new varieties and identify regions of the genome associated with key traits through detailed stakeholder discussions.

The major beneficiaries of this research will be:
Plant breeding community: Information on the application of genomic selection in an oat breeding programme will be of value to other breeders of oats and other cereal crops. Development of high throughput screens for key traits associated with milling quality, grain composition and yield that can be used at the early stages of the breeding programme necessitating lower seed quanities will enhance selection ofr yield and quality and wil be of direct benefit to genomic selection approaches but more generally would be beneficial to other breeding programmes.

Arable sector: The project will have a significant economic and environmental benefit on the arable sector. Oats are recognised as a low input cereal crop, that can be grown in arable rotations across the UK. It is an excellent break crop and therefore has a major role in sustainable arable rotations. Application of genomic selection and high throughput phenotyping to the breeding of improved oat varieties with greater yield and grain and milling quality that meets the needs of end-users and the oat value-chains will improve the economics of growing the crop and its value to the arable sector. This will ensure that oats remain a competitive crop for arable production and that the benefit of growing oats in arable rotations is realised.

Milling industry:Increasing awareness of the health benefits of eating oats, largely due to the beta-glucan content of the grain but also to other grain compositinal characteristics, is increasing the demand for oats and oat based products at a time when the oat crop is increasingly challenged by competition from other cereals. using GS approaches to increase the yield of new oat varieties will increase the financial return of growing oats and will help to ensure that the milling industry has a greater security of supply. The focus on grain quality and composition will also ensure that new varieties have the essential grain quality characteristics that ensure the economic efficiency of the mills and cost benefit. The milling industry will also benefit from the focus on grain composition which will enhance the potential of using oats for different end-uses.

Society: Direct benefit will be gained from ensuring the supply of a cereal with recognised health benefits. Enhanced yield and quality of oat varieties will improve the economics of growing oat crops and so ensure that oats, as alow input cereal remain a part of sustainable arable rotations, increasing cropping diversity.