Capturing novel quality and soil health traits for sustainable barley production

Understanding how the environment affects gene expression during plant development is a key challenge in crop improvement not just to maintain yields in changing climates and reductions in chemical interventions, but also for selecting traits such as nutritional value and malting quality. Barley is an ideal model cereal for translation of basic research through the supply chain to the end user. It is the fourth ranked cereal crop produced in the world and has a good level of adaptability to cold, drought or poor soils, and tolerates difficult growing conditions. Barley provides essential protein in many parts of the world and is a major component of animal feed as well as providing £20 billion to the UK economy through alcohol production. Breeders work with high yielding, elite varieties from a narrow gene pool for commercial development which display reduced genetic variation compared to the wider species genepool, including heritage, land race and crop wild relatives. This decline in genetic variation therefore reduces the number of allelic variants available for breeding new varieties. As well as this, selection for nutritional enhancement and malting quality as added value traits has lagged-behind selection for agronomic performance under high chemical intervention. This area needs to be developed to ensure the secure supply of barley for the food and drink industry.


PROJECT

1. Can new metabolomics techniques be used to identify compounds that relate to malting quality and differentiate between heritage varieties?
This industrial CASE project will focus on using new metabolomics methodology at Liverpool GeneMill to identify compounds responsible for different post-malting flavours, and that are required for a positive flavour profile, such as soluble sugars and free amino acids that react during the kilning process.
The project will also look at the variation in nutritional quality such as Beta-glucan and gluten content.

2. Genome wide association analysis (GWAS) to identify loci linked to added value traits and agronomic importance in barley breeding.
We will collate the existing trait data obtained through the BBSRC Partnering Award and new data from New Heritage Barley and combine with the metabolomics analysis. We will also have field trial plots at Ness Botanic Gardens to explore the impact of growth in acidic soil conditions. We will use the line means as input for GWAS analyses with the SNP genotype data previously collected. Loci linked to phenotypic variation will be used to select appropriate parents for breeding.