UK: Barley research at the Scottish Crop Research Institute receives funding
The barley programme at the Scottish Crop Research Institute has just won four competitive research contracts worth over £3 million, SeedQuest communicated on May 25. Dr Robbie Waugh, the leader of the Institute said they are to extend their work on the underlying genetic mechanisms that control yield, quality and environmental sustainability of the crop. This funding will enable the team to employ five additional scientists for the next 4 years.
About 30% of the arable land area of Scotland currently grows barley. Most Scottish barley is used in the manufacture of beer and whisky. Whisky is consistently the UK’s largest export in the food and drink sector, earning over £2.2 billion in 2004 and employing over 13,000 people in Scotland, mainly in rural communities. Last year at least 90% of the barley used in Scotch Whisky was from Scottish growers; improvement of varieties would fill the gap, promote the industry and invigorate the economy in rural areas of Scotland.
The £3M research funding will allow the SCRI Barley Research Group to look for the genes that control the characters that are important for improving barley production and use. While this will be a stiff challenge, this project brings experimental and analytical tools used in human and plant genetic studies to identify and understand how natural gene variants influence desirable plant characters. It will take advantage of local expertise in statistics, and extensive plant materials and datasets available through UK national plant evaluation trials.
Dr Waugh argues that once they have derived a good understanding of what combinations of genes are required to make a good barley variety, breeders will be able to look for even better ones, tailored to meet both the industries’ exact requirements and improve the impact that growing the crop has on the environment.
Improving economically important characteristics of barley such as yield, resistance to pests and diseases (which dictates how much the crop will need to be sprayed to protect it) and the amount of alcohol that can be extracted from it during the process of making ‘malt’ whisky are key targets of commercial barley breeders. Barley breeding routinely involves making a cross between two different parent cultivars to generate a very large number of daughter lines. During this process, the DNA of the parental lines is shuffled to generate an almost infinate number of combinations, only one of which is represented in each daughter line. The breeders challenge is to identify a daughter line that is better than the parents for one or more of the selected characters. Like us, the genetic characteristics of individual barley cultivars is determined by the specific combinations of genes that it contains. However, as the barley DNA probably contains over 40,000 genes it is difficult to identify which combinations are important for the crop’s environmental, grower and industry acceptance.
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