The barley programme at the Scottish Crop Research Institute, led by Dr Robbie Waugh, has just won four competitive research contracts worth over £3 million to extend their work on the underlying genetic mechanisms that control yield, quailty and environmental sustainability of the crop.  This funding will enable the team to employ five additional scientists for the next 4 years.

Most Scottish barley is used in the manufacture of beer and whisky.  Whisky is consistently the UK’s largest export in the food and drink sector, earning over £2.2 billion in 2004 and employing over 13,000 people in Scotland, mainly in rural communities.  About 30% of the arable land area of Scotland currently grows barley.

Improving economically important characteristics of barley such as yield, resistance to pests and diseases (which dictates how much the crop will need to be sprayed to protect it) and the amount of alcohol that can be extracted from it during the process of making ‘malt’ whisky are key targets of commercial barley breeders.  Barley breeding routinely involves making a cross between two different parent cultivars to generate a very large number of daughter lines.  During this process, the DNA of the parental lines is shuffled to generate an almost infinate number of combinations, only one of which is represented in each daughter line.  The breeders challenge is to identify a daughter line that is better than the parents for one or more of the selected characters.  Like us, the genetic characteristics of individual barley cultivars is determined by the specific combinations of genes that it contains.  However, as the barley DNA probably contains over 40,000 genes it is difficult to identify which combinations are important for the crop’s environmental, grower and industry acceptance.

The £3M research funding will allow the SCRI Barley Research Group to look for the genes that control the characters that are important for improving barley production and use.  While this will be a stiff challenge, this project brings experimental and analytical tools used in human and plant genetic studies to identify and understand how natural gene variants influence desireable plant characters.  It will take advantage of local expertise in statistics, and extensive plant materials and datasets available through UK national plant evaluation trials.

Dr Waugh argues that once they have derived a good understanding of what combinations of genes are required to make a good barley variety, breeders will be able to look for even better ones, tailored to meet both the industries’ exact requirements and improve the impact that growing the crop has on the environment. 

Last year at least 90% of the barley used in Scotch Whisky was from Scottish growers; improvement of varieties would fill the gap, promote the industry and invigorate the economy in rural areas of Scotland.

BACKGROUND

BBSRC / SEERAD / Defra LINK – ‘Association Genetics of UK elite barley’  Principal Investigators:  Dr. Robbie Waugh, Dr. Luke Ramsay, Dr. Bill Thomas SCRI, [ Collaborators Dr. D. O’Sullivan at NIAB (Cambridge) and Prof. Z. Luo at University of Birmingham,  Industrial collaborators and sponsors:  Advanta, CPB Twyfords, Dalgety / Secobra, New Farm Crops, RAGT/PBI, Svalof Weibull, Brewing Research International, SWRI, MAGB, COORS, MRS, HGCA, Crop Evaluation Limited]    Value £1.8M

Two separate grants awarded jointly by BBSRC and SEERAD (£404,000 and £500,000) will allow the SCRI team to address specific areas of barley genetics which will increase knowledge about how barley genes work and contribute further to the understanding of the growth and functioning of barley plants.

An award of Euro 450,000 (c. £300,000) from the EU Framework 6 program will look at the genetic processes underlying disease resistance.  This is part of a Euro 15M Integrated project called BioExploit.

SCRI increases knowledge in plant and environmental sciences. The research is focussed on plants to improve the understanding of processes that regulate their growth and response to pests, pathogens and the environment. This includes understanding genetics to breed crops with improved quality and nutritional value as fast as possible. By understanding the plant’s response to pests and diseases and how they react to the soil, air and water around them, environmentally friendly methods of protecting crops from the ravages of pests, diseases and weeds can be designed.

SCRI is grant-aided by the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department (SEERAD) and has charitable status. It is one of five Scottish Agricultural and Biological Research Institutes (SABRIs) which, together with those of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, form the agricultural and food research service of the UK