“Work must start now to create a UK food supply that meets new standards of resilience, sustainability and competitiveness based on stakeholder partnership”
Ambler-Edwards et al., 2009 Chatham House Report on Food Security

This project will develop and apply state-of-the-art genomic and metabolomic tools for oat genetic improvement.

Its focus is on the understanding and manipulation of key traits that will enhance the value of oats in human health improvement, capitalise on the value of oats as a low input cereal, increase the environmental and economic sustainability of cereal based rotations, realise the potential of oats as a high value animal feed and develop new opportunities for using oats through advanced fractionation.

Powerful enabling technologies for the identification of specific genes and markers will drive the development of breeder –friendly tools accelerating the production of improved oat varieties that will be marketed by industrial partners.

A multi-disciplinary programme which combines modern phenotyping methodologies with the expertise of genomics researchers, oat breeders and end-users, will also address long term breeding goals by developing experimental populations which are polymorphic for agronomically important traits but more amenable to mapping and forward genetic approaches than conventional agronomic lines.

 

The QUOATS project, led by Aberystwyth University (IBERS), is jointly sponsored by BBSRC, by Defra through the Sustainable Arable LINK Programme, by European Regional Development Funding through the Welsh Assembly Government’s Academic Expertise for Business Programme and through the Scottish Government Contract Research Fund as well as AHDP  through DairyCo, EBLEX and HGCA