By Marcia Wood
Every day, bakers from coast to coast make fresh, fragrant loaves of
bread for us to enjoy. Wheat flour, of course, is a star ingredient in many
of the most popular breads.
The work of tomorrow's millers and bakers might be made much easier by
studies under way at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Western
Regional Research Center in Albany, Calif. There, scientists like plant
geneticists Olin D. Anderson and Yong Q. Gu are tackling some of the
mysteries surrounding wheat's genetic makeup.

Their discoveries may one day help millers provide bakers with flour
that is both consistent and predictable?two highly prized traits. These
superior flours would consistently make doughs that have the optimal balance
of strength and elasticity. That could, according to Gu, take away the need
to blend various different flours?a costly, sometimes frustrating task for
today's millers.

Gu, Anderson and others in the Genomics and Gene Discovery Research
Unit at Albany are exploring wheat's remarkably complicated, mostly
undeciphered genetic makeup, or genome. Wheat is a complex union of three
ancestral grass genomes that together make the wheat genome huge?about 10
times the size of the human genome, according to Anderson.

The Albany researchers are hunting for naturally occurring differences
in the order of appearance, or sequence, of the infinitesimally small
units?called "nucleotides?that make up genes. The differences that they're
interested in are known as "single nucleotide polymorphisms," or "SNPs"
(pronounced "snips") for short.

Though tiny, SNPs are not trivial. In wheat plants, a SNP might mean
the difference between having high amounts of a protein important in
breadmaking?or very low amounts of it. Single-nucleotide variations could
affect genes for many other key wheat-plant traits, such as resistance to
insects or diseases.

Read more about the research in the September 2007 issue of
Agricultural Research magazine.

ARS is the U.S. Department of Agriculture's chief scientific research
agency.



[www.ars.usda.gov]