Project Leader Roger Andersson

Project leader in C4F for Starch quality improvement.

Expertise: Long experience on carbohydrates in plant food. For example, how food processing affects chemical structure and properties of polysaccharides such as starch and dietary fibre. The properties can be nutritional (for example effects on blood cholesterol or satiety) or technological (for example viscosity or gelling behaviour). Many projects include collaborations with plant breeders to find out how biosynthesis works in order to be able to tailor future crops for specific applications.

Research activities and achievements

In the first phase of TC4F, our work was focused on high amylopectin starch from genetically modified potatoes. The general aim was to study its potential for use in packaging materials since starch films are good oxygen barriers and may be useful in food packaging preventing oxidation. This work resulted in one PhD-thesis (Carolin Menzel, 2014) and was carried out in collaboration with Karlstad University. An important finding was that the genetic modification in the potato resulted in amylopectin with very long outer chains that was responsible for the amylose-like behavior of the starch. This finding was further explored in the second phase of TC4F. We have shown that the modified amylopectin can form high levels of resistant starch after cooking of the potato tubers. Resistant starch acts as a dietary fiber in the human intestine and is fermented by the gut microbiota. It can currently not be used as human food because of the status of the EU legislation, but may be used as a food ingredient with health benefits if future legislation allows. Currently our work continues with elucidation of the molecular structure of starch aiming to find relationships between structure and technological behavior. This work is carried out by two PhD-students, Xue Zhao and Shishanthi Jayarathna, in collaboration with the Department of Plant Breeding at SLU, Alnarp.

Publications related to C4F

Källman, A., Bertoft, R., Koch, K., Sun, C., Åman, P., Andersson, R. 2015. Starch structure in developing barley endosperm. International Journal of Biological Macromolecules, 81, 730-735.

Källman, A., Bertoft, E., Koch, K., Sun, C., Åman, P. and Andersson, R. 2015. Starch structure in developing barley endosperm. Int. J. Biol. Macromol, 81: 730-735.

Källman, A., Vamadevan, V., Bertoft, E., Koch, K., Seetharamana, K., Åman, P., Andersson, R. 2015. Thermal properties of barley starch and its relation to starch characteristics. Int. J. Biol. Macromol, 81: 692-700.

Menzel, C., Andersson, M., Andersson, R., Vázquez-Gutiérreza, J. L., Daniel, G., Langton, M., Gällstedt, M., Koch, K. 2015. Improved material properties of solution-cast starch films: Effect of varying amylopectin structure and amylose content of starch from genetically modified potatoes. Carbohydr. Polym, 130: 388-397.

Jin, Y., Fei, M., Rosenquist, S., Lu Jin, L., Gohil, S., Sandstrom, C., Olsson, H., Persson, C., Hoglund, A.S., Fransson, G., Ruan, Y., Aman, P., Jansson, C., Liu, C., Andersson, R., Sun, C. 2017. A dual-promoter gene orchestrates the sucrose-coordinated synthesis of starch and fructan. Molecular Plant 10, 1556-1570

Zhao, X., Andersson, M., Andersson, R. 2018. Resistant starch and other dietary fiber components in tubers from a high-amylose potato. Food Chem., 251, 58-63.