Abstract
The diet of approximately three billion people worldwide is nutrient deficient and most of the world’s poorest people are dependent on staple food crops as their primary source of micronutrients. One component of the solution to nutrient deficiencies is collaboration among plant breeders, cereal chemists and nutritionists to produce staple crop cultivars with increased mineral nutrient concentration. Sixty-three historical and modern wheat cultivars were evaluated for grain yield and concentration of calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, selenium, and zinc. While grain yield has increased over time, the concentrations of all minerals except calcium have decreased. Thus a greater consumption of whole wheat bread from modern cultivars is required to achieve the same percentage of recommended dietary allowance levels contributed by most of the older cultivars. The decrease in mineral concentration over the past 120 years occurs primarily in the soft white wheat market class, whereas in the hard red market class it has remained largely constant over time. This suggests that plant breeders, through intentional selection of low ash content in soft white wheat cultivars, have contributed to the decreased mineral nutrient concentration in modern wheat cultivars. These results contradict the theory that there exists a genetically based, biological trade-off between yield and mineral concentrations. Therefore, using the abundant variation present in wheat cultivars, it should be possible to improve mineral concentrations in modern cultivars without negatively affecting yield.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Dr. Margaret Smith, Dr. Preston Andrews, Dr. Salvatore Ceccarelli, Dr. Byung-kee Baik, Dr. Lu Ann Johnson, Dr. Gary Hareland, Dr. John Reganold, Dr. Kim Campbell, Dr. Tim Murray, David Granatstein, Julie Dawson and two anonymous reviewers for comments on the manuscript. Unparalleled technical assistance was provided by Steve Lyon, Meg Gollnick and Kerry Balow. This work was funded by Washington State University’s Centre of Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, The Land Institute, the Organic Farming Research Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Integrated Organic Program (Grant Number: 2006–02057) and Washington Wheat Growers. The authors declare no competing financial interests.
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Murphy, K.M., Reeves, P.G. & Jones, S.S. Relationship between yield and mineral nutrient concentrations in historical and modern spring wheat cultivars . Euphytica 163, 381–390 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-008-9681-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10681-008-9681-x