Development of a Universal Method of Measuring Macromolecules in Oats.

Abstract: The breeding of agricultural food crops has been of imperative importance for thousands of years and remains so today, with new methods being developed regularly. Some of these newer methods have some legal difficulties, forcing scientists to stay with the older, reliable yet slower methods. With one of these methods; mutation breeding, oat is being developed with new properties such as high content of proteins or healthy beta-glucan fibres for the market of the future. A challenge in this method is to quickly screen vast numbers of different oat lines to find these desired traits. In order to speed up this process I have strived to develop a method to store a preparation of oat flour for longer periods of time in a state that is compatible with the starch, beta-glucan and protein assays without degradation. Also, an alternate method for weighing oat flour on a scale has been attempted to be developed, since this too is a bottle-neck. The results show that by storing the oat flour in a fridge (+5°C), all three macromolecules remain stable for at least 5 years. Further, a heat sterilized or biostatic-containing slurry of oat flour in water shows promising potential of preventing degradation of all three macromolecules by being stored in a frozen state. In order to avoid the time consuming scale, a spectrophotometer’s absorbance at 610 nm has been shown to correlate with the oat flour concentration with a sufficient accuracy for screening purposes.