BarleyFunFood

The program is funded by the faculty (50% funding) and the industry (50% funding). The participating SLU departments contribute with additional resources such as saleries for professors while participating companies have internal projects of importance for the program but these are not included in the program.

The BarleyFunFood research team includes plant biologists, plant breeders, chemists, food scientists, microbiologists and nutritionists working during the first three years within two subprograms. The first subprogram Barley Biology includes 6 projects (collection and cultivation of barley, screening of barley kernels with NIT and NIR, functional genomics in barley, characterization of carbohydrates in barley kernels, development of NMR-based methods for characterization of biological samples and metabolic fluxes, and carbohydrate incorporation in developing barley endosperm). Since at this stage it is not possible to study new genotypes from the program, the second subprogram Nutritional Effects of Cereal Carbohydrates will start with available cereal fractions with known carbohydrate composition, i.e. fractions rich in arabinoxylan, mixed-linkage beta-glucan,  fructan and different types of starch. This subprogram includes three subprojects (characterization of carbohydrates in cereal fractions/cereal foods, cereal fibers and satiety, and prebiotic effects of different cereal carbohydrates).