More beer, less stress

In a program which promises to boost the nation's billion dollar barley exports by up to a third, a team at the Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre (MPBCRC) is busy turning 'cow-tucker' into top quality beer-making ingredients.

The secret lies in the stress, says University of Adelaide doctoral researcher Elysia Vassos.

Feed barley, used mainly to nourish livestock, copes well with the stresses of drought, frost and disease prevalent in the Australian environment. But it doesn't make good beer.

Malting barley, on the other hand, makes beautiful beer - but is harder to grow and gets stressed more easily, leading to lower yields, she says.

To beat the problem, the MPBCRC team decided to take a different tack to the usual approach. Rather like a coach renewing a football team, instead of trying to bolster the established malting barleys, they are using molecular marker technology to turn hardy, feed barleys into elite malt performers.

Molecular markers are a rapid way of checking whether new, experimental kinds of barley - crossbred in the traditional way - have the genetic make-up to be superior malt producers.

Developed over more than a decade, they point to regions on the barley plant's chromosomes that indicate if it has - or hasn't - the required malting abilities.

The goal is to develop new barleys which are resilient, high yielding and rich in malt, to service a booming export market as consumers throughout China and SE Asia toast their rising affluence with a growing intake of the amber fluid.