Carotenoid Biosynthetic Pathway Guided Development of Nutritionally Enhanced Orange Sweet Corn

NutraMaize seeks to develop commercial Orange Sweet Corn hybrids with high levels of health- benefitting antioxidant carotenoids and excellent sensory attributes that will help address USDA Strategic Goal 7: Provide All Americans Access to a Safe Nutritious and Secure Food Supply. This technology will leverage a popular accessible and affordable food format to deliver more health protecting antioxidant carotenoids to Americans. In turn this approach has the potential to help protect public health since low carotenoid intake puts the majority of older Americans at an increased risk of developing age-related macular degeneration the leading cause of vision loss and irreversible blindness for Americans over 60 that affects nearly 20 million individuals. The proposed breeding approach will use an innovative carotenoid biosynthetic pathway guided selection strategy that aims to pyramid multiple favorable alleles introgressed from high carotenoid field corn donor lines to achieve unprecedented carotenoid levels in sweet corn. The goal of this Phase I project is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of this approach by developing early generation proof of concept germplasm and molecular markers for a set of key carotenoid genes. Subsequently these resources would be used during a potential Phase II project to develop finished Orange Sweet Corn inbred lines and commercial hybrids. Once developed and adopted NutraMaize Orange Sweet Corn has the potential to make a meaningful impact on the amount of health protecting carotenoids consumed by Americans.