2] New oat varieties

WP leader: Alfredo Zambrano jose.zambrano@tbiokem.lth.se

Oat kernels contain many health-promoting bioactive substances such as dietary fibres, proteins, vitamins, sterols and other lipids, antioxidants, tocopherols, inositol phosphates and not the least avenanthramides. To be a cereal, oat grains have unusually high oil content and the oil is rich in unsaturated fatty acids and in addition contains unique galactolipids. Moreover, oat proteins have the highest proportion of globular proteins amongst any cereal crops. Current oat breeding is not primarily directed towards quality although these parameters are also taken into account at later steps.

ScanOats is using high precision molecular, biochemical and chem-analytical technologies directly aimed at selecting quality traits (protein, lipids and fibers) as well as agronomically important traits including tolerance to the fungal disease Fusarium, nitrogen and phosphorus uptake and abiotic stress tolerance.

Developing new oat varieties with precise and a priori defined traits is greatly facilitated by using gene editing techniques such as CRISPR/Cas9. Another alternative is to use randomly induced mutations, which has the advantage of generating a huge amount of genetic variation. TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) methodologies have during the last years become a powerful tool in this respect.