Advancements in Cereal Quality Assessment: Implications for Crop Improvement and Food Processing

A special issue of Plants (ISSN 2223-7747).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 April 2025 | Viewed by 80

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Research Centre for Olive, Fruit and Citrus Crops, Council for Agricultural Research and Economics (CREA), Corso Savoia, 190, 95024 Acireale, Italy
Interests: enrichment of cereal-based foods; development of innovative, sustainable bakery products with health benefits; food waste upcycling; statistical data analysis; applying advanced techniques (data mining, factor analysis, PCA, clustering methods)

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The journal Plants will publish a Special Issue entitled “Advancements in Cereal Quality Assessment: Implications for Crop Improvement and Food Processing”.

Cereals, representing the most important agricultural products for both human and animal nutrition worldwide, play an outstanding role: these crops and their products are important staple foods, providing essential nutrients and bioactive compounds. In recent years, significant advances have been achieved in the assessment of grain quality, leading to improvements in primary cereal production. These improvements include higher yields, reduced incidence of fungal diseases and, consequently, lower levels of mycotoxins, enhanced protein and gluten content (in the case of gluten cereals), a better amino acid profile and, especially in gluten-free cereals, increased fiber content with a favorable soluble/insoluble ratio.

At the level of industrial processing, there is growing interest in the wider utilization of cereal grains that are usually hulled (oats, barley, einkorn, dicoccum, spelt).

Therefore, considering the high interest in the advances in cereal quality as an emerging challenge for crop improvement and food processing, this Special Issue will cover a wide variety of related areas, with the aim of contributing to the overall knowledge of different quality aspects, such as the physicochemical, rheological, technological, microbiological and sensorial aspects of cereals and processed products.

Dr. Alfio Spina
Dr. Maria Allegra
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • bread and durum wheat
  • corn
  • rice
  • barley
  • oats
  • rye
  • hulled cereals
  • quality
  • crop improvement
  • industrial processing

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