Starch: the need for improved quality or quantity--an overview

Starch is one of the most important plant products to man. It is an essential component of food providing a large proportion of the daily calorific intake and is important in non-food uses such as in adhesives. However, while much is known about the chemistry and pathways of synthesis for starch, there are major gaps in this knowledge so that it is not possible to modify the quantity or quality of starch produced by plants in a predictable way. While yield has improved markedly over the last century it is no longer improving faster than the growth in population and, at the same time, farmers' incomes in Europe have been falling, especially in the UK. Thus, production, even in Europe, is not much greater than demand. In the western world an increasing amount of the harvested crop is processed and, therefore, the quality of the raw product becomes an increasingly important issue. There is, therefore, an increasing need to combine the modern mathematical modelling tools with modern biochemical tools and the modern science of genomics.