Prolonged and intensive breeding of wheat has produced varieties that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Such artificial selection can risk prioritizing traits of value to producers over those of importance to consumers. So is there evidence that crop improvement has left modern wheat nutritionally impoverished?
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to CGIAR and the CGIAR WHEAT programme for financial support to prepare a review (Project No. A403 1.09.47) on which parts of this article are based. Rothamsted Research receives strategic funding from the Biotechnological and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) of the UK. We are grateful to M. Rakszegi (Agricultural Institute, Centre for Agricultural Research, Martonvásár, Hungary) and D. Boros (Institute of Plant Breeding and Acclimatization, Radzikow, Poland) for providing the data for Fig. 2 and S. Hey (Rothamsted Research) for preparing the figure.
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T.K.P. and A.L. carried out the analyses of samples and data. All authors wrote the paper.
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Shewry, P., Pellny, T. & Lovegrove, A. Is modern wheat bad for health?. Nature Plants 2, 16097 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.97
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.97
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