Turning barley straw into composite materials isn’t something you may immediately think of, but this is the focus of researchers at IMT Mines Ales as part of the ‘Boosting photosynthESis To deliver novel CROPs for the circular bioeconomy’ or ‘BEST-CROP’ project. The 2ndannual BEST-CROP meeting was held at IMT Mines Alès where the Hutton BEST-CROP team learned about the production of novel and state of the art composite materials from our favourite crop.
Kelly Houston and Paul Shaw (IBH)
There is a need for a ground-breaking technology to boost crop yield (for both grain and biomass) and its processing into materials of economic interests. Novel crops with enhanced photosynthesis and assimilation of green-house gasses, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and ozone (O3), and tailored straw suitable for industrial manufacturing (such as in the development of state-of-the-art composite materials) can contribute towards this change. BEST-CROP is an alliance of European plant breeding companies, straw processing companies and academic plant scientists aiming to use the major advances in photosynthetic knowledge to improve barley yield and to exploit the variability of barley straw quality and composition. BEST-CROP aims to capitalize on very promising strategies to improve the photosynthetic properties and ozone assimilation of barley including tuning leaf chlorophyll content and modifying canopy architecture, increasing the kinetics of photosynthetic responses to changes in irradiance, introducing photorespiration bypasses and modulating stomatal opening, thus increasing the rate of CO2 fixation and O3 assimilation. Besides higher yield, the resulting barley straw will be tailored to increase straw protein content to make it suitable as an alternative feed production source and to control cellulose/lignin content and properties to develop straw reinforced polymer composites. BEST-CROP aims to exploit barley natural- and induced-genetic variability as well as gene editing and transgenic engineering.
Kelly and Paul both presented the work that the Hutton team have been working on over the past year. Kelly detailed the development of the Laureate tilling resources and pipeline for mutant discovery and Paul the informatics and data sciences work that we are undertaking to help collect, store, access and publish the datasets that the project will generate using Hutton tools like GridScore (gridscore.hutton.ac.uk) and Germinate (https://germinateplatform.github.io/get-germinate). Lastly, we both presented a video on Hutton, IBH, University of Dundee and Dundee in general to persuade the BEST-CROP consortium to have their summer 2025 meeting at the new IBH building – we were successful! If you want to see the video we made you can see it here>
You can learn more about the work we are doing under the BEST-CROP project either by following on Twitter/X @best_crop, by checking out the project website https://www.bestcrop.eu or by asking any of the Hutton team!
BEST-CROP is a 5-year project (2023-2027) funded by the European Union and UKRI. Both Hutton and University of Dundee have invovlvement. The project at Hutton is led by Kelly Houston (CMS) and Paul Shaw (ICS, WP7 Lead), the team comprises Robbie Waugh, Miriam Schreiber (ICS), Sebastian Raubach (ICS), Malcolm Macaulay (CMS), Niki McCallum (CMS) and Chris Warden (CMS). The University of Dundee team includes Claire Halpin and Amy Learmonth.
Our BEST-CROP work at Hutton has been supported since 2023 by the European Union Grant Agreement No 101082091 and by UK Research and Innovation.
