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Future Cereal Starch Bioengineering: Cereal Ancestors Encounter Gene Technology and Designer Enzymes

¹Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. ²Corresponding author. Phone: +45 35333304. Fax: +45 35333333. E-mail: abl@life.ku.dk ³Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Section of Crop Genetics and Biotechnology, Aarhus University, Denmark.

The importance of cereal starch production worldwide cannot be overrated. However, the qualities and resulting values of existing raw and processed starch do not fully meet future demands for environmentally friendly production of renewable, advanced biomaterials, functional foods, and biomedical additives. New approaches for starch bioengineering are needed. In this review, we discuss cereal starch from a combined universal bioresource point of view. The combination of new biotechniques and clean technology methods can be implemented to replace, for example, chemical modification. The recently released cereal genomes and the exploding advancement in whole genome sequencing now pave the road for identifying new genes to be exploited to generate a multitude of completely new starch functionalities directly in the cereal grain, converting cereal crops to production plants. Newly released genome data from cereal ancestors can potentially allow for the reintroduction of cereal traits including, for example, health-promoting carbohydrates that may have been lost during domestication. Raw materials produced in this manner can be processed by clean enzyme-assisted techniques or thermal treatment in combination to further functionalize or stabilize the starch polymers. Importantly, such products can be multifunctional in the sense of combined food/material or food/pharma purposes, for example, edible plastics, shape memory materials, and cycloamylose carriers and stabilizers for diverse bioactives.