Barley is one of the earliest domesticated cereals and one of the most produced crops in the world. However, most of it is used for non-direct food purposes such as animal feed and malt. And only very little is use for direct human consumptions in the form of flour or boiled or fried grain. For flour or baking, barley simply does not have as efficient physical and chemical properties of the protein network to obtain a quality bread, due to lack of proper disulfide bridging among grain proteins. This is unfortunate, since an increased intake of barley flour and bread in the population would be able to increase public health and reduce environmental impact of grain production compared with wheat.
In this project, we will work on developing a method based on liquid chromatography mass spectrometry for protein profiling of barley grains coupled with functional analysis using bioinformatics. The method will be applied to investigate different cultivars of barley.
In this project, you might also use two-dimensional gel-electrophoreses as well as other protein chemical analyses.
The target is to develop barley as a food commodity and is done in collaboration with AU based spin-out company Plantcarb, which develops novel grain-based food products.
