Using RNAi To Engineer More Nutritious Wheat Varieties

Filed in archive Food and Agriculture , Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics on January 10, 2007

Using RNA interference technology, scientists have identified a gene in wheat called Gpc-B1 that regulates its nutritional content.

Collaborators working under the direction of wheat breeder and professor Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California-Davis found that kernels harvested from the plants with lowered Gpc-B1 levels had at least 30 percent less grain protein, zinc and iron. According to Blechl, the work proved that Gpc-B1 controlled all of these nutrients.

Further studies are planned to determine whether incorporating additional copies of these genes in wheat would lead to a correspondingly more nutrient variety. Read more from ScienceDaily. Or, you can read the scientific manuscript describing the above study from Science.