Carotenoid pigments are considered essential nutrients for humans and animals because they cannot synthesize them and must therefore be incorporated from the food. They are responsible for the yellow pigment content (YPC), an important quality trait of durum wheat for making pasta and couscous. However, the storage and industrial processing of wheat grain can reduce the carotenoid content and consequently the YPC. Carotenoid esterification is a general mechanism for carotenoid accumulation, sequestration, and storage in plants, and can be a good strategy to increase carotenoid retention in the durum wheat food chain.

In this work, we investigated the effect of carotenoid esterification with fatty acids on pigment retention during grain storage in durum wheat. For this purpose, we used two consecutive storage experiments: 1) In a preliminary work, two landraces with esterification ability (BGE047520 and BGE047535) conserved at the National Plant Genetic Resources Centre (INIA-CSIC) and two durum wheat varieties (‘Amílcar’ and ‘Olivadur’) without lutein esters were compared for the carotenoid content and profile; 2) Second, F2 segregating individuals derived from the BGE047535 × ‘Athoris’ cross were analyzed contrasting for esterifying ability to validate our results.

The results show that carotenoid esterification leads to a higher carotenoid retention during storage in durum wheat. Thus, the use of the carotenoid esterification would be useful as an additional strategy to ongoing efforts to improve carotenoid retention in the durum wheat food chain as a step forward in breeding to improve the commercial and nutritional quality during grain storage.

Acknowledgements

This research was financed by project PID2021-122152NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ and by ERDF “ERDF A way of making Europe”