Short project description

Plants produce a variety of metabolites which are stored in their seeds and ingested by consumers. Many of these compounds are increasingly discovered to possess health-promoting features to humans. In particular cereals, such as rye, wheat and barley produce various compound classes with proven effects on human health. However, cereal breeding strategies often focus on improving yield and resistance of cereals, where the ability to produce respective compounds may be reduced across generations. Heritage varieties are rediscovered for implementation into sustainable strategies of crop production and provide the possibility to be a hidden treasure of “healthy” metabolites.

This project aims at screening a global selection of heritage wheat varieties for their biosynthesis of health-related metabolites. Our facilities of state-of-the-art analytical chemistry (LC-MS/MS) provides the opportunity for targeted and untargeted metabolite screening of many known and unknown compounds, respectively.

There is the possibility to get proficient in analytical chemistry and natural product chemistry with high agricultural and nutritional/medicinal relevance. Further, experiments in lab/greenhouse/field settings can be part of the MSc project.

The work performed may have potential to lead to a scientific manuscript.