Well, tell me what you have for breakfast
this morning?
Probably you have a bagel, you like to eat
your pizza, you like to eat your pasta.
Wheat is so important because it provides
roughly one-fifth of all the calories and
all the protein that people consumes everyday.
Every small improvement that you can make
in wheat can have a important impact in the
life of a lot of people.
Our objective is very simple, we want better
wheats, in everything.
We want better quality, we want better nutrition,
we want less allergenicity of wheat for people
that have a lot of allergies to wheat.
We want more resistance to pathogens, we want
more efficient use of the resources that we use.
But it's a fight that we continue to fight,
the pathogens continue to evolve and we need
to develop new resistance, so we are permanently
fighting pathogens that also want to eat the wheat.
It makes you resilient, and in these times
of climate change, resilience is important.
So you need to be able to respond to changes
fast.
And without research it's difficult to do
it.
These new varieties that we developed have
10 times more dietary fiber, and as you know,
dietary fiber is good for your health.
But sometimes it's nicer to eat white bread,
so this will allow us to make a bread that
is not whole wheat, and still we have a lot
of fiber.
To create these varieties we have to do a
lot of work first.
First we need to create a way to detect those
mutations.
So we recently been working for the past five
last years in the technology that allow us
to sequence all the genes of wheat, and to
find all the mutations that we have in our
mutant populations, and we have created a
database that contains 10 million mutations
in 90,000 genes of wheat.
So we can find the mutations of any gene that
we want.
I think that what keeps me up is the sense
that your work is meaningful, that you are
doing something that will be helpful for a
lot of people, that you are making something that,
with your life, that will help other
human beings.
It's a fantastic job.
