Genetic Improvement of Dietary Fiber in Wheat

Dietary fiber is a polysaccharide that cannot be completely broken down by human digestive enzymes. It plays an important role in promoting intestinal health, controlling blood sugar levels, and regulating blood lipids. Moderate intake of dietary fiber can reduce the negative effects of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and gastrointestinal problems, making it one of the effective dietary intervention methods to prevent obesity and diabetes. As an important food crop in the world, the dietary fiber content of wheat is one of the important indicators of its nutritional quality. The dietary fiber content of whole wheat cereals is about 9% to 20%, which is higher than rice (2.7% to 9.9%) and corn (3.7% to 19.9%). The outer bran layer of wheat grains is the portion rich in dietary fiber, but after processing or refining, pure flour has lower dietary fiber content. Therefore, increasing the dietary fiber content in wheat grains, especially endosperm and flour, and improving the palatability of whole wheat flour products have become important goals for improving wheat nutrition and special functional quality.

In February 2024, Seed Biology published online a review paper titled "Genetic improvement of dietary fiber wheat in grains" by the Wheat Research Center of China Agricultural University. This article systematically reviews the research progress on the three main types of dietary fibers in wheat grains - arabinoxylan, β-glucan and resistant starch.

The review first summarizes the main biosynthetic pathways of these three types of dietary fiber, as well as the key genetic loci/genes and excellent allelic variations of anabolic metabolism, and discusses the breeding strategies for genetic improvement of dietary fiber in wheat grains. Secondly, it points out the challenges faced in improving research on wheat dietary fiber, including how to solve the adverse effects of increasing dietary fiber content on wheat yield and processing quality, and how to improve the taste and palatability of high dietary fiber wheat. Finally, possible solutions for improving wheat dietary fiber are proposed, such as in-depth understanding of the synthesis and regulation mechanism of dietary fiber, optimizing the biosynthetic pathways of arabinoxylan, β-glucan and resistant starch in wheat endosperm; using excellent allelic variations in key starch synthesis genes for breeding and improvement; increasing the thickness of bran or aleurone layer to increase the dietary fiber content of wheat grains, etc. In summary, this review article comprehensively summarizes the important progress in research on wheat grain dietary fiber and proposes future development directions.

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Reference:

Yang, C., et al. Genetic improvement of dietary fiber in wheat grains. Seed Biology. 2024, 3: e002

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