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By Alice McFarlane

World Food Day

Improving the nutritional content of pulses

Oct 16, 2019 | 12:26 PM

It’s World Food Day.

Scientists have been working to deliver more nutritious crops to developing countries with undernourished populations and to Western countries for healthier diets.

Saskatchewan is uniquely set up to address these issues.

The province is a major exporter of field peas to many other countries including India, China and Bangladesh while the University of Saskatchewan is home to Canadian Light Source (CLS). As a result, the province could help to develop more nutritious crops and send them to the people who need them across the world.

Analyzing peas using the synchrotron light could be faster and more environmentally friendly.

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Dr. Tom Warkentin is a professor of plant science and pulse breeder in the Crop Development Centre at the University of Saskatchewan’s College of Agriculture and Bioresources. With thousands of seed samples produced every growing season, Warkentin said he needs fast, accurate and cost-effective techniques to assess the nutritional value of the pea varieties he has developed. Two recent studies show promise.

“These studies arose from the question, ‘Can we use the synchrotron to measure the nutrient traits in pea seeds?’” Warkentin said in a news release. “Improving the nutritional value of peas is a higher and higher priority for us in plant breeding so we wanted to look at the standard approaches we’ve been using to measure nutritional traits versus the techniques available at the CLS.”

Determining the levels of protein, starch, micronutrients and other elements enables breeders to select lines that provide the highest levels of dietary minerals for humans and offers a potential solution to mineral deficiency in many parts of the world.

Warkentin described both studies as proof-of-concept research, and both indicated a comparable level of accuracy between CLS techniques.

An important advantage is the small sample size required for the synchrotron methods; new breeding lines often have very limited quantities of available seeds. In both studies, the seeds were ground into a fine powder and pressed into thin wafers for analysis. Conventional methods often involve the addition of chemicals, making sample preparation tedious, time consuming and potentially environmentally unfriendly.

Dr. Chithra Karunakaran, environmental and earth sciences manager at the CLS and co-author on both studies said there is an additional benefit of the synchrotron techniques.

“They work just as well no matter what the sample is—seeds, leaves, tissue or roots,” Karunakaran said.

Warkentin added he expects tweaks to the testing protocol will improve the speed of data collection but he believes any other plant breeder would see it as an interesting option.

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alice.mcfarlane@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @AliceMcF