Plant nutrition scientists at the University of Nottingham have just secured funding to carry out research into bio-fortifying brassicas to boost dietary intakes of calcium and magnesium.

The project is being funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and agrichemical firm Yara UK. The aim is to enrich brassicas such as broccoli, Chinese cabbage and pak choi using conventional breeding techniques and to develop a new type of fertilizer. The potential to improve human health worldwide is substantial. Dr Martin Broadley, associate professor of plant nutrition and lead scientist on the project said: “This project is an exciting opportunity which could ultimately deliver real dietary benefits for the UK and globally. Recent studies have shown that leafy brassica crops are excellent targets for biofortification with calcium and magnesium, even where vegetable consumption is relatively low, such as in the UK. By combining fertiliser-use with the development of more blue-skies conventional breeding tools, we hope that this project will bring benefits in both the short and longer-terms, as well as improve our understanding of plants.”

In the UK, vegetables provide less than a tenth of average calcium and magnesium intakes. A relatively modest increase in the concentration of these minerals in green leafy vegetables would have a significant beneficial effect on health. Broadley believes this is likely to be achievable by improving fertilizers and breeding programmes. He said: “Although it seems an obvious solution, we do not yet know how much calcium or magnesium fertilizer to apply to soil to optimise dietary intakes. This is because fertilizer studies tend to focus on crop yield. The blue-skies breeding approaches rely on the fact that each different variety of brassica represents a unique collection of variants of genes (alleles)…By crossing different varieties, and finding combinations of alleles which alter the calcium and magnesium content of plant leaves, we can inform conventional breeding programmes.

This four-year long project builds directly on recent investment in brassica research in the UK and elsewhere, which means there could soon be a fully sequenced genome to work with. It is part of a long-standing collaboration between scientists at The University of Nottingham, The University of Warwick, Rothamsted Research and the Scottish Crop Research Institute (SCRI).

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