£1.5m Norfolk project to find perfect pea

Plant scientists at the Norwich Research Park are leading the quest to find the perfect pea in a £1.5m project announced today.

And the world-famous collection of about 3,500 pea varieties at the John Innes Centre, Colney, will play a key role in the investigation.

The part-government funded research project, which involves plant breeders, food industry and scientists, aims to identify tastier and higher-yielding pea varieties over the next three and a half years.

A team led by Dr Claire Domoney will grow plots of peas from this spring to evaluate varieties with suitable genes for farmers to grow for the human food market.

With thousands of peas in the collection, Dr Domoney said that the challenge was to identify the particularly valuable traits. “Once we identify the determinants of seed quality and what the breeders want to improve we can got back to the germplasm collection and find novel variations for those traits,” she added.

And having access to the collection, which had been assembled by the curator, Mike Ambrose, was a major advantage to the project team based at the JIC, said Dr Domoney, who has researched legumes and peas for the past 20 years.

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