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Wheat grain quality is notoriously variable, which carries significant economic implications for the cereals industry. This makes it an important challenge to gain deeper understanding and control of the determinants and drivers of these variations which affect both the functional and nutritional properties of the grain. The focus of research has turned to the cell-wall components. Mass spectrometry imaging was combined with specific cell-wall degrading enzymes to investigate how these polymers are structured and their spatial distribution at whole-grain scale. Our results shed new light on how  the tissue-level  partitioning of cell-wall polymers is linked to their structure. The enzymatic tools employed here can readily be adapted to carry this methodological development over to other plant systems and other polymers in order to study, for instance, the degradability of grass stems used in biorefinery processes.

Publication

Fanuel, M., Ropartz, D., Guillon, F., Saulnier, L., and Rogniaux, H. (2018) Distribution of cell wall hemicelluloses in the wheat grain endosperm: a 3D perspective, Planta. DOI: 10.1007/s00425-018-2980-0