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Revolutionising wheat: Developing cultivars that maintain their quality in heat and drought

28 April 2023 | Story Leonie Bolleurs | Photo Supplied

UFS PhD student and food scientist Schae-Lee Olckers’ research could contribute to a stable supply of good quality wheat and bread, even in the face of climate change.

Follow your passion in order to find your purpose. This is the mantra of food scientist and University of the Free State (UFS) PhD student Schae-Lee Olckers, whose research is set to improve wheat quality by identifying which types of wheat are better able to tolerate stress, and which proteins are most important for producing high-quality bread.

“By grasping this, it is possible to ensure that we continue to have a stable supply of good quality wheat and bread, even in the face of climate change,” says Olckers, who believes wheat is one of the most important food grains in the human diet, and one of the most important staple cereal crops in the world.

Her PhD study, ‘The influence of abiotic stress on gluten protein and baking quality in bread wheat’, under the supervision of Dr Angie van Biljon and Prof Maryke Labuschagne in the Department of Plant Sciences, and Prof Garry Osthoff in the Department of Microbiology and Biochemistry, is investigating how different levels of heat and drought stress – mostly due to climate change – affect the gluten protein composition of high-yield bread wheat.

Olckers is a food scientist at StartWell Foods (Pty) Ltd, a non-profit organisation that produces high-quality extrusion products for feeding schemes around the country. The products help to eliminate stunted growth among children.

Improving wheat breeding programmes

This research could help us find ways to adapt to climate change and continue to produce high-quality wheat and bread for people around the world. – Schae-Lee Olckers

Her research focuses on examining different types of wheat and investigating how proteins are affected by stressors like heat and drought, to understand how these stressors impact the quality of bread. She uses new proteomic methods to look at the different proteins in the wheat flour, to gain a better appreciation of how gluten proteins react to stress.

In this study Olckers is able to see how the proteins change in the various wheat cultivars, helping us to understand how the different types of wheat perform in baking, and how the proteins affect the final product.

She collaborates with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico, that releases new wheat cultivars for developing countries. Their aim is to develop wheat cultivars that maintain their quality in different environments. To investigate the performance and characteristics of the seeds, both in the field and in the laboratory, CIMMYT did the field trials, quality assessment, and supplied the seeds for high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) and proteomics analysis.

Finding ways to adapt to climate change

She believes that understanding how these stressors impact the production of bread-baking quality in wheat will help scientists gain important insights into how climate change affects our food supply.

“Taking into consideration the current and projected intensifying heat and water deficit stresses, it is crucial to improve the understanding of these phenomena in order to implement new breeding strategies for sustainable wheat quality. This research could help us find ways to adapt to climate change and continue to produce high-quality wheat and bread for people around the world,” Olckers says.

News Archive

Harvard couple to present lectures on Biostatistics and Mathematics at the UFS

2015-12-07

Professor Donald Rubin

Prof Donald Rubin (John L. Loeb Professor of Statistics at Harvard University) and Elizabeth Zell (MStat - mathematical statistician in the Division of Bacterial Diseases) will visit the University of the Free State (UFS) where they will present lectures on their respective work.

Over his prestigious academic career, Prof Don Rubin’s 400 publications and 13 books have earned him around 180 000 citations at an h-index of 113. He is one of the most cited statisticians/mathematicians/economists/psychologists in the world over the last 10 -15 years. He has supervised 35 PhD candidates as sole-supervisor, 17 more as co-supervisor, with a further eight in the pipeline.

Prof Rubin who will meet with UFS academics in the Department of Mathematics and Actuarial Sciences will also deliver a lecture: Rerandomisation to improve covariate balance in experiments.

Randomised experiments are the “gold standard” for estimating causal effects, yet in practice, chance imbalances often exist in covariate distributions between treatment groups. If covariate data are available before units are exposed to treatments, these chance imbalances can be mitigated by first checking covariate balance before the physical experiment takes place. Provided a precise definition of imbalance has been specified in advance, unbalanced randomisations can be discarded, followed by a rerandomisation. This process can continue until a randomisation yielding balance according to the definition is achieved. By improving covariate balance, rerandomisation provides more precise and trustworthy estimates of treatment effects.

Prof Rubin received an honorary professorship from the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the UFS.

Elizabeth Zell

The lecture will take place on:
Date: Tuesday 8 December 2015
Time: 16:00
Venue: Albert Wessels Auditorium, Bloemfontein Campus

Zell earned her Master’s degree in Statistics at North Carolina State University, and for more than two decades, was an active bio-statistical researcher in various offices of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Since 2013, she has been the Principal Statistician and President of Stat-Epi Associates, Inc. Her 150+ publications have earned her 14 500 citations at an h-index of over 50. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and, in 2010, she received the Statistics Section Government Award for outstanding contributions to statistics and public health by the American Public Health Association. During her career at the CDC, she earned more than 20 CDC research awards and honours.

She will deliver two lectures at the UFS. The first is entitled A Potential Outcomes Approach to Documenting the Public Health Impact of the Introduction of PCV13 for the Prevention of Invasive Pneumococcal Disease. The topic of her second lecture is: Assessing the Effectiveness of Intrapartum Antibiotic Prophylaxis for Prevention of Early-Onset Group B Streptococcus Disease through Propensity Score Design

Elizabeth’s lectures will take place on:
Date: Wednesday 9 December 2015
Time: 10:45 and 13:00
Venue: West Block 111, Bloemfontein Campus

For more information, please contact Dr Michael von Maltitz at VMaltitzMJ@ufs.ac.za.

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