Delivering Sustainable Wheat: Nutritional Traits (Rothamsted Research)

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The targets selected in this WP are based on their importance for health and the importance of wheat as a dietary source. Deficiencies of iron and zinc affect about 2 billion people globally. Iron deficiency also occurs in the UK with intakes significantly below the lower reference levels for girls aged 11-14 and women aged 19-49. Calcium deficiency is also increasing with decreased consumption of dairy products. Wheat is an important source of minerals in the UK contributing 15-19% of calcium 15-17% of iron and 11-13% of zinc. Although all refined flours and breads produced in the UK are fortified with iron and calcium to restore levels to wholemeal the levels of deficiencies indicate that this is not effective. This is due at least in part to the low bioavailability of the mineral forms that are used for fortification. The programme (1) will combine QTL mapping of landrace populations with GE and TILLING approaches to deliver high levels of bioavailable minerals in white flour (HLO 3.1). The developed world is experiencing an “epidemic” of chronic diseases which is largely attributable to changes in lifestyle and diet including the consumption of highly refined foods which are rapidly digested. Disease risks can be reduced by changes in diet with long term cohort studies showing that increased intake of dietary fibre is associated with reduced risk of a range of diseases including cardio-vascular disease type 2 diabetes and several types of cancer (notably colorectal cancer). However UK adults only consume about 18g of fibre a day compared with a recommendation of 30g. Cereals contribute about 40% of the total fibre in the UK diet with bread alone contributing about 20%. Although the consumption of fibre-rich wholegrain bread has been widely promoted this has failed to have a significant impact and white bread remains the staple food. In this programme (2) we will use a combination of GE and TILLING approaches to manipulate the molecular and granular structure of starch in bread wheat to reduce starch digestibility with concurrent increases in dietary fibre (HLO 3.2). We will (3) further enhance the fibre content of white bread through targeting gene pathways involved in arabinoxylan (AX) biosynthesis and we will demonstrate the health relevance of these high AX lines in a clinical intervention study (HLO 3.3).

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