An Overview of Omics for Wheat Grain Quality Improvement - Crop Improvement: New Approaches and Modern Techniques - page 304

Chapter 10
An Overview of Omics for Wheat Grain
Quality Improvement
Awais Rasheed, Tariq Mahmood, Alvina Gul-Kazi
and Abdul Mujeeb-Kazi
Abstract Cereal grain quality aspects are integral aspects of a complex food chain,
which assimilate outputs achievable by breeding, production and processing. In
order to get better economic gains and be internationally competitive in diverse
market scenarios, it is paramount to breed wheat cultivars with better grain quality.
Higher grain quality demands are exponentially increasing due to novel processing
technologies, environmental changes and change in consumer preferences due to
striking demographic shifts. Advances in the genomic arena of grain quality are
considered crucial for defining genes and their networks underpinning functional
flour qualities. The complexities associated with the genes underlying these traits
can be resolved by elucidating functional and comparative genomics information
of relevant genes and the efficient transfer of such information across cultivars.
Wheat, due to wider consumption as a staple food, has been a subject of inten-
sive cytogenetic investigations which are now extended further in the genomics
era using powerful tools of molecular biology and new genetic stocks. The recent
progress in wheat genomics research particularly the use of molecular markers for a
variety of purposes and advances in map based positional cloning of several genes
has been remarkable. As a result we have been able to better understand the wheat
genome and the mechanisms involved in the function of different quality encod-
ing genes. Additionally, we have also utilized information generated from genom-
ics research in producing better quality grains. The advances in the genomics of