Docent lecture: Modern plant breeding – use of precision tools to meet the need of sustainable and healthier crops

"My research is mainly about improving the quality of the plant storage products starch, oil and protein, where potato and starch has received a lot of my focus. Besides water, starch is the most abundant component of the potato, but unfortunately, it provides a high glycemic index (GI) when eaten. A potato with starch that is digested more slowly or partly resistant to digestion, would be beneficial for our health and would control blood sugar levels and body weight. Starch consists of two molecules, amylose and amylopectin, at a distribution of about one to four. Of the two molecules, amylopectin is solely responsible for the high GI. By mutating two genes in potato involved in the building of amylopectin, we have created a starch that looks and behaves more like an amylose. The starch has thus become a slow and resistant carbohydrate instead of a fast carbohydrate. This high-amylose starch has also been proven to have favourable properties as a raw material producing bioplastics, a renewable product that could replace some plastics produced from fossil oil." - read full description.