Marketing and Delivery of Quality Grains and Bioprocess Coproducts

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Our research goal is to improve the end-use quality and processing of wheat, barley and legumes through basic research. We will identify grain characteristics of wheat affecting processing and product quality, as well as properties suitable for making improved quality bread, noodles, cookie and cakes. This information will be delivered to and used by wheat breeding programs for the development of wheat varieties with improved end-use quality. For the purpose of expanding food uses of barley and legumes, we will identify and characterize the traits important for food use. Our research also will deal with phenolics, polyphenol oxidase activity, grain hardness, starch property and anthocyanins of barley, and oligosaccharides, phenolics, antioxidant activity, protein composition and digestibility of legumes. This information will help us screen and develop varieties with minimal undesirable characteristics, but with maximum desirable components for food use and human health. <P>
APPROACH: Our research will mainly focus on one of the specific objectives of the project, to characterize quality attributes and develop systems to measure quality of cereals, oilseeds, and bioprocessed coproducts. We will continue to investigate the end-use quality attributes of cereal grains and legumes related to processing and product quality. The major emphasis of our research will be placed on the physical and compositional characteristics of wheat, especially starch functionality and protein quality as related to processing and product quality of bread, noodles, cookies and cakes. This information will lead to the establishment of an end-use quality profile of each wheat class for specific markets/end-products, which will subsequently serve as a guideline for development of wheat varieties with improved functional properties. Despite increased interest in consuming barley as a human food, mainly due to its well-established health benefits, our knowledge in identifying and developing barley varieties suitable for food use is quite limited. We plan to identify traits of barley important for processing barley for foods and prepared food quality. Physical grain traits as well as compositional characteristics of barley will be explored. We will also investigate the quantitative and qualitative uniqueness of barley phytochemicals for their potential application in food and non-food along with their health benefits. Cool season food legumes, including peas, chickpeas and lentils, contain fewer digestible carbohydrates and more protein than cereal grains, and are often considered as naturally healthy foods, even though consumption of these legumes in the U.S. is extremely small, probably due to cultural eating habits. Our research will be directed toward the promotion of legume consumption. Specifically, we will explore the potential uses of legumes in many existing food products and identify components of legumes that provide health benefits. We will also determine the uniqueness of legume starch and protein, considering their potential use in foods with improved functionality.