Improvement of Cereal Quality by Genetic Engineering

If I had to nominate an area of food production in which science has played a major role in addressing product quality to meet market needs I would not pass by the intimate rela­ tionship of cereaI chemistry with cereaI plant breeding programs. In Australia, cereaI chemistry and product quality labs ha ve long been associated with wheat and barley breeding programs. Grain quality characteristics have been principal factors determining registration of new cultivars. This has not been without pain in Australia. On the one hand some cultivars with promising yield and agronomic characteristics have been rejected on the basis of quality characteristics, and for a period our breeders imposed selection regimes based on yield which resulted in declining quality characteristics. In the end the market provides the critic al signals. For many years Australia held a commanding market position on the basis of a single quality image, initiaHy based on bulked wheat of fair/average quality (FAQ). Later this was improved by segregation into four broad classes• based around Australian Standard White (ASW). This is no longer a viable marketing strategy. We were probably a little slow in rec­ ognising the mosaic of present day wheat markets, but now have up to 18 different grades available. Around the world wheat is a grain with many end uses. Its use in bread is expanding.