CROP WILD RELATIVES

Improvement of flour quality is one of the main objectives in the process of wheat breeding. It is supposed that wild emmer wheat can provide a lot of genetic variants of the endosperm storage proteins in enhancing bread-making quality. However, the flour quality of wild emmer wheat itself, which is generally believed to be poor, is lack of awareness yet. In this work, dough rheological properties of 27 accessions of wild emmer wheat were intensively analyzed through the micro-doughlab. The results showed that the mean values of water absorption (WA), development time, stability time (ST), and degree of softening (four dough rheological parameters) for all the samples were 77.2 %, 1.73, 1.68 min and 116.6 BU, respectively. Surprisingly, the coefficient of variation of ST was apparently higher than those of the other three listed parameters, indicating that there may be a large difference among the flour quality of wild emmer wheat. Based on the four dough rheological parameters mentioned above, the cluster analysis of the 27 accessions of wild emmer wheat revealed good flour quality in some test materials, while majority of them showed poor property. Typically, two accessions of TD-129 and TD-51, with significantly different flour quality, are selected and systematically analyzed to deeply understand the flour quality of wild emmer wheat. It is exciting to find that the main quality parameters of TD-129 reach the normal level or even the strong gluten quality in absence of wheat D genome, with the values of WA, ST, Mid-line peak time, angle of descent and gluten index reaching 74.55 %, 9.55, 2.63 min, 12° and 46.5 %, respectively. These results imply that the endosperm storage proteins of TD-129 might contain valuable high-quality genes, which could be transferred to bread wheat in an attempt to improve baking quality.