Title:Molecular Approaches to Understand Nutritional Potential of Coarse Cereals
VOLUME: 17 ISSUE: 3
Author(s):Amit Kumar Singh, Rakesh Singh, Rajkumar Subramani, Rajesh Kumar and Dhammaprakash P. Wankhede
Affiliation:Division of Genomic Resources, ICAR- National Bureua of Plant Genetic Resources, Pusa Campus, New Delhi 110 012. India
Keywords:Association mapping, Coarse grains, Genomics, Metabolomics, Millets, Proteomics, Transcriptomics, Quality
traits.
Abstract:Coarse grains are important group of crops that constitutes staple food for large population
residing primarily in the arid and semi-arid regions of the world. Coarse grains are designated as nutricereals
as they are rich in essential amino acids, minerals and vitamins. In spite of having several nutritional
virtues in coarse grain as mentioned above, there is still scope for improvement in quality parameters
such as cooking qualities, modulation of nutritional constituents and reduction or elimination
of anti-nutritional factors. Besides its use in traditional cooking, coarse grains have been used mainly
in the weaning food preparation and other malted food production. Improvement in quality parameters
will certainly increase consumer’s preference for coarse grains and increase their demand. The overall genetic gain in
quality traits of economic importance in the cultivated varieties will enhance their industrial value and simultaneously increase
income of farmers growing these varieties. The urgent step for improvement of quality traits in coarse grains requires
a detailed understanding of molecular mechanisms responsible for varied level of different nutritional contents in
different genotypes of these crops. In this review we have discussed the progresses made in understanding of coarse grain
biology with various omics tool coupled with modern breeding approaches and the current status with regard to our effort
towards dissecting traits related to improvement of quality and nutritional constituents of grains.
