£1.5m Norfolk project to find perfect pea

The John Innes Centre. Photo: Mike Page.

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 get 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.

Peas, which have been grown for about 3,000 years, are now valued as a high-quality source of dietary protein.

The market for vining peas is worth about £35m a year at farmgate although the area has fallen by 10,000 hectares in the past 10 years to 30,000ha. And only last month, Birds Eye cut 4,000ha in Norfolk and Suffolk.

But the national pea crop for human consumption is worth an estimated £100m a year and includes tinned peas, "mushy peas" and dried peas with about 50,000ha expected to be sown this spring.

Dr Domoney said that her team will be working with industry from plant breeders and food companies, which want even better varieties.

"Breeders will look at potential varieties in the national collection, which might be long, stringy or just don't grow very well. But if they've a good gene influencing seed quality or disease, it might have potential," she added.

"We're be looking at all peas. We have vining peas, canning peas which are very closely related but harvested later, and marrowfats which are harvested dry.

"We do see the marrowfats as a very good source of dietary protein and nutrition and particularly when we're looking at a climate when we're supposed to decreased our consumption of meat for all sorts of reasons."

Dr Domoney's team will be working with colleagues at York with Fera, the food and environment agency.

A number of farmers in the eastern counties grow marrowfat varieties, typically blue peas, which are in demand in the Middle East and in Japan as a snack food.

The LINK project is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), Defra and industry bodies including the Peterborough-based Processors and Growers Research Organisation (PGRO) and companies including Bird's Eye, Premier Foods and Pinguin Foods.