Review Article
Spanish Ancient Wheats: A Genetic Resource for Wheat Quality Breeding
Juan B. Alvarez* and Carlos Guzmán | ||
Department of Genetics, School of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering, Building Gregor Mendel, Rabanales Campus, University of Córdoba, ceiA3, ES-14071, Cordoba, Spain | ||
Corresponding Author : | Juan B. Alvarez Department of Genetics, School of Agricultural and Forestry Engineering Building Gregor Mendel, Rabanales Campus University of Córdoba, ceiA3, ES-14071 Córdoba, Spain E-mail: jb.alvarez@uco.es |
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Received January 23, 2013; Accepted February 13, 2013; Published February 17, 2013 | ||
Citation: Alvarez JB, Guzmán C (2013) Spanish Ancient Wheat: A Genetic Resource for Wheat Quality Breeding. Adv Crop Sci Tech 1:e101. doi: 10.4172/2329-8863.1000101 | ||
Copyright: © 2013 Alvarez JB, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. | ||
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Abstract
Wheat (Triticum sp.) is one of the most important food crops worldwide. Di-, tetra- and hexaploid species are available, which along with the different subspecies of this genus have been used for food and feed. However, the genetic diversity of this crop has been seriously compromised, and only two main species; the durum and bread wheat, currently exist. The germplasm materials that were used in the past in Spain, have been regarded as ancient wheats, thus forming a group of neglected or underutilized crops that could be an interesting reservoir of variation for modern wheat breeding. In the last decade, our group has been evaluating and characterizing for the morphological and quality traits some of these Spanish ancient wheats. In these materials, using the SDS-PAGE technique and DNA sequencing, we detected an important variability for seed storage proteins, starch synthases and puroindolines, which are related with three important quality characteristics of wheat: gluten levels, starch levels and hardness, respectively. These novel variants could be used with the dual goal of genetic improvement and enriching the gene pool of these components in modern wheat.