Scientists lay groundwork for expanding quinoa production

Hipster favourite quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) is a highly nutritious, gluten-free, low-glycaemic-index crop that contains an excellent balance of essential amino acids, fibre, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins and minerals, and is also able to grow under a wide range of environmental conditions. However, quinoa is still an underutilised crop and breeding efforts to improve its agronomic traits are required to expand its worldwide production.

The first high-quality reference genome for quinoa has now been published online in Nature journal. The resource is expected to assist genetic improvement and breeding strategy efforts for quinoa.

Australian researcher Mark Tester and colleagues from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia sequenced the genome of a Chilean coastal variety of quinoa along with the genomes of additional Chenopodium species to characterise quinoa’s genetic diversity and understand the evolution of its genome.

The authors also identified a gene that regulates the production of saponins, bitter-tasting molecules found in the quinoa seed shell, which must be removed before human consumption. The authors suggest that the genetic markers that they identified may be used to develop non-bitter or sweet commercial varieties of quinoa with reduced saponin levels.

They conclude that the findings provide the foundation for accelerating the genetic improvement of quinoa, with the objective of enhancing global food security.

Image caption: Panicle of quinoa, growing in the greenhouse at KAUST. Credit: Linda Polik, KAUST.