Modifying seeds to produce proteins

Although seeds are mainly used for food or feed, they are also used as raw materials for various other industrial applications. Improvement of the nutritional quality of protein in legumes and cereals has been the prime aim of plant breeders. Crop breeding has undergone major changes during the last decades and new selection strategies are based on sophisticated genetics, the use of computational power, and biometric methods in field trials. On the other hand, the processing quality of seeds can be modified by altering the structural grain constituents or the enzyme activities that mobilize storage reserves of the seeds. Recent developments in the molecular biology of seed proteins offer breeders new tools for this work.