January 29, 2003

Purdue University agriculture researchers are among those trying to make sure that all the planet's people have access to adequate food. Purdue efforts to improve nutrition worldwide include:

Purdue sorghum a hot commodity in Africa

Over the next two years, some 400,000 African families may enjoy a variety of sorghum developed at Purdue. Purdue researchers distributed the striga-resistant sorghum to 1,000 farm families in Ethiopia and Eritrea. Striga is a parasitic weed estimated to cause sorghum crop losses of more than $7 billion annually. Subsistence farmers in semi-arid regions cannot afford costly chemical controls for the
weed. The farmers who received the seeds are operating demonstration plots, multiplying the seed and redistributing the harvested seed to other communities. Sorghum is the primary food source for hundreds of millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa.

CONTACT: Gebisa Ejeta, professor of agronomy, (765) 494-4320, gejeta@purdue.edu.

Purdue develops easier to digest sorghum

Although sorghum is consumed by people and animals alike, it is not as easily digested as other cereals. Typical protein in sorghum is 46 percent digestible compared to the protein in corn, which is 73 percent digestible.

A Purdue food scientist found that protein bodies inside sorghum seed are surrounded by a tough inner protein wall. Stomach enzymes take longer to break down the wall to reach the nutritional proteins in sorghum than is true for similar grains, such as corn.

Further study identified a special sorghum variety, in which the protein body wall is structured differently. This sorghum variety has substantially higher protein and starch digestibility.

CONTACT: Bruce Hamaker, professor of food science, (765) 494-5668, hamakerb@purdue.edu.