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High-Speed NIR Segregation of High- and Low-Protein Single Wheat Seeds

¹Postdoctoral research associate and research leader, respectively, Engineering Research Unit, USDA-ARS, Grain Marketing and Production Research Center, 1515 College Avenue, Manhattan, KS 66502. Names are necessary to report factually on available data; however, the USDA neither guarantees nor warrants the standard of the product, and the use of the name by the USDA implies no approval of the product to the exclusion of others that may also be suitable. ²Corresponding author. Phone: 785-776-2753. Fax: 785-537-5550. E-mail: fdowell@gmprc.ksu.edu.

Wheat breeders need a nondestructive method to rapidly sort high- or low-protein single kernels from samples for their breeding programs. For this reason, a commercial color sorter equipped with near-infrared filters was evaluated for its potential to sort high- and low-protein single wheat kernels. Hard red winter and hard white wheat cultivars with protein content >12.5% (classed as high-protein, 12% moisture basis) or < 11.5% (classed as low-protein) were blended in proportions of 50:50 and 95:5 (or 5:95) mass. These wheat blends were sorted using five passes that removed 10% of the mass for each pass. The bulk protein content of accepted kernels (accepts) and rejected kernels (rejects) were measured for each pass. For 50:50 blends, the protein in the first-pass rejects changed as much as 1%. For the accepts, each pass changed the protein content of accepts by ≈0.1%, depending on wheat blends. At most, two re-sorts of accepts would be required to move 95:5 blends in the direction of the dominant protein content. The 95:5 and 50:50 blends approximate the low- and high-protein mixture range of early generation wheat populations, and thus the sorter has potential to aid breeders in purifying samples for developing high- or low-protein wheat. Results indicate that sorting was partly driven by color and vitreousness differences between high- and low-protein fractions. Development of a new background specific for high- or low-protein and fabrication of better optical filters for protein might help improve the sorter performance.