Prospects for genetic improvement of Ancient Grains
D. B. HAYS (1), J. Awika (1), W. Rooney (1), J. Taylor (2). (1) Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, U.S.A.; (2) University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa
The ancient grains comprising sorghum, millets, pseudocereals and indigenous legumes are inherently no different the big four cereals wheat, maize, rice and barley. They have a highly nutritious embryo and either a transient or nonliving endosperm storage reserve. Like the big four cereals, the ancient grain crops are genetically diverse in adaptability, productivity and especially in allelic diversity in seed storage fractions comprised of diverse storage proteins, starches, oils, and phytin. As such, given proper longterm commitment and investment the ancient grains are capable of incredible genetic improvement in terms of yield improvement, but end-use functionality breeding in terms of modifying their major and minor storage fractions for food, feed, beverage, nutrition, and bio-pharmaceuticals and –industrials through conventional breeding, high throughput molecular breeding (MB) or targeted genetic engineering. Brilliant examples of optimizing end-use traits by breeding for specific starch, protein, oil and antioxidant fractions in the big four, and all other major crops are two numerous to list, yet they demonstrate the flexibility of ‘the seed” and that ‘the sky is the limit’ in terms of end-use functionality focused ancient grain breeding. In this presentation, high value markets for sorghum our program has targeted will be discussed. In these applications we have altered specific grain protein and starch fractions for the purpose of optimizing its rheology, food, feed, beverage and fuel end-use functionality through targeted traditional plant breeding.
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