# Technological Properties of Tritordeum Starch
## 1 Introduction  
Drought is an important abiotic stress influencing crop production, including cereals, and it is anticipated to increase with ongoing climate change. Recently, cereal breeders focused their efforts on the creation of interspecific hybrids to obtain new cereals with improved phytochemical contents and agronomic performances. Tritordeum is the cereal derived from the cross between a South American wild barley (_Hordeum chilense Roem. [PERSON]_) and a cultivated durum wheat (_Tritcium turgiatum ssp. durum Desf._). It allowed for transferring useful barley traits to wheat, and a new cereal crop was developed [1, 2]. Tests conducted in Central European climatic conditions proved that winter tritordeum is more suitable for cultivation due to a higher yield. Although the protein content in tritordeum was higher than in wheat, due to its poor baking properties, the obtained breads were characterized by a lower loaf volume compared to wheat. This could suggest that this crop would be more suitable for feeding purposes [3].  
The main component of cereal kernels is starch, which is a storage carbohydrate, and it constitutes more than half of their dry mass, which makes them a perfect raw material for industrial starch separation. Starch can be obtained during the industrial separation of other valuable components like gluten or \(\beta\)-glucans [4, 5]. Tritordeum contains higher amounts of protein and gluten than its wheat progenitor and could become a raw material suitable for gluten separation; therefore, starch can be obtained as a by-product of such an operation.  
Native starch occurs in the form of semi-crystalline granules with very distinctive shape and dimensions depending on their botanical origin. Its functional properties arestrongly influenced by its botanical origin and result from its characteristics like granule size, chemical composition, and internal structure. The presence of lipids has an especially great impact on starch properties such as water binding capacity, pasting phenomena, or retrogradation [4; 6; 7; 8]. Starch in most applications is used as a water-governing agent and is responsible for creating texture. A small presence (0.4%) of minerals (calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, and sodium) can be observed in starches, and except for phosphorus, they have almost no functional significance.  
Starch finds really broad applications in different branches of industry. Starches are applied in food formulations due to their impact on viscosity, paste and gel formation, texture creation, the binding of water, moisture retention, or film formation. Therefore, starches are broadly used in formulations of soups, sauces and gravis, bakery products (starch is the main component of flours), dairy confectionery, snacks, batter and coatings, and meat products [9; 10].  
The increasing industrial demand for starches suited for specific applications results in the search for new sources. So far, tritordeum starch has not attracted much interest from researchers. However the introduction of this cereal into broader cultivation, due to its specific features, could lead to a situation in the future in which tritordeum will become the raw material for gluten separation. Then, large amounts of starch will also be produced. Therefore, an attempt was undertaken to investigate some basic properties of starch isolated from tritordeum and compare them to other cereal starches.