Context and challenges

The climate change-related conditions anticipated in 2050 include a rise in ambient CO₂ levels, more droughts and higher temperatures, which will all affect grain yield and quality. This project aims to study how different types of hardness – a major characteristic in the classification of wheat types – may respond to contrasting environments, with particular emphasis on health and nutritional quality from field to fork. Indeed, these classes differ depending on the presence and type of alleles in genes coding for specific proteins called puroindolines. These proteins display antifungal properties and are implicated in interactions between grain constituents, which could impact product composition and quality.

 Objectives

The project aims to determine whether wheat grain hardness modifies tolerance of climate change and to evaluate its effects on the nutritional quality of food products. The project will benefit from the existence of original genetic materials from wheat varieties which have the same genetic base but differ in terms of their puroindoline-encoding alleles. This material will be cultivated under contrasting water and CO₂ levels. The project will study the effects of hardness as a function of environmental conditions on the physical and biochemical characteristics of grain produced in the field and subsequently its fractionation aptitude. It will enable the quantification of potential contamination by Fusarium fungal mycotoxins (as a function of fungal pressure during wheat cultivation), the presence in flour and semolina of compounds arising from the micronutrient-rich aleurone layer and soluble fibres of interest, and finally the digestibility of the resulting products. This project, which will cover all stages from cultivation in the field to the finished product, will provide data that can be considered by breeders and processors in order to obtain products of improved health value.

INRAE units involved

• Ingéniérie des agropolymères et technologies émergentes (IATE)
• Génétique diversité écophysiologie des céréales (GDEC)
• Sciences pour l’œnologie (SPO)
• Toxicologie alimentaire (TOXALIM)

Partners

• UMR 95 QualiSud (Démarche intégrée pour l'obtention d'aliments de qualité) - Équipe 1 « Fonctionnalités sensorielles des aliments »
• ONIRIS-UMR GEPEA CNRS 6144 / USC 1498 Dépt TRANSFORM-INRAE
• ARVALIS