Abstract

Cereal grains provide half of the calories consumed by humans. In addition, they contain important compounds beneficial for health. During the last years, a broad spectrum of new cereal grain-derived products for dietary purposes emerged on the global food market. Special breeding programs aimed at cultivars utilizable for these new products have been launched for both the main sources of staple foods (such as rice, wheat, and maize) and other cereal crops (oat, barley, sorghum, millet, etc.). The breeding paradigm has been switched from traditional grain quality indicators (for example, high breadmaking quality and protein content for common wheat or content of protein, lysine, and starch for barley and oat) to more specialized ones (high content of bioactive compounds, vitamins, dietary fibers, and oils, etc.). To enrich cereal grain with functional components while growing plants in contrast to the post-harvesting improvement of staple foods with natural and synthetic additives, the new breeding programs need a source of genes for the improvement of the content of health benefit components in grain. The current review aims to consider current trends and achievements in wheat, barley, and oat breeding for health-benefiting components. The sources of these valuable genes are plant genetic resources deposited in genebanks: landraces, rare crop species, or even wild relatives of cultivated plants. Traditional plant breeding approaches supplemented with marker-assisted selection and genetic editing, as well as high-throughput chemotyping techniques, are exploited to speed up the breeding for the desired genotуpes. Biochemical and genetic bases for the enrichment of the grain of modern cereal crop cultivars with micronutrients, oils, phenolics, and other compounds are discussed, and certain cases of contributions to special health-improving diets are summarized. Correlations between the content of certain bioactive compounds and the resistance to diseases or tolerance to certain abiotic stressors suggest that breeding programs aimed at raising the levels of health-benefiting components in cereal grain might at the same time match the task of developing cultivars adapted to unfavorable environmental conditions.

Highlights

  • Cereal crops are the main food and feed sources worldwide, supplying more than half of the calories consumed by humans [1]

  • An important role in promoting this breeding trend is played by the achievements in modern genetics of cereal crops and traits associated with the quality and dietary value of their products

  • It has been proven that the crucial role in Fusarium Head Blight (FHB) resistance is played by five main classes of antioxidant metabolites: phenolic acids, flavonoids, carotenoids, tocopherols, and benzoxazinoids [127]

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Summary

Introduction

Cereal crops are the main food and feed sources worldwide, supplying more than half of the calories consumed by humans [1]. The concentration of all efforts on these two targets and none other resulted in a certain decline in the genetic diversity in those plant characters that are associated with the biochemical composition of cereal grain [2]. In the last few years, cereal crop breeding generated a trend aimed at combining high biochemical and agronomic parameters in one cultivar [3,4,5]. An important role in promoting this breeding trend is played by the achievements in modern genetics of cereal crops and traits associated with the quality and dietary value of their products. New breeding programs imply that the developed high-yielding cultivars will combine maximum contents of the abovementioned components and optimal correlations among them with other grain quality indicators and resistance to biotic stressors. The current review aims to consider current trends and achievements in wheat, barley, and oat breeding for health-benefiting components

Micronutrients
Antioxidants
Phenolic Compounds and Avenanthramides
Tocols
Sterols
Carotenoids
Other Antioxidant Compounds
Biotic Stress Resistance
Abiotic Stress Resistance
Findings
Conclusions
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