Historically, agroecosystems have been designed to produce food. Modern societies now demand more from food systems—not only food, fuel, and fiber, but also a variety of ecosystem services. And although today's farming practices are producing unprecedented yields, they are also contributing to ecosystem problems such as soil erosion, greenhouse gas emissions, and water pollution. This review highlights the potential benefits of perennial grains and oilseeds and discusses recent progress in their development. Because of perennials' extended growing season and deep root systems, they may require less fertilizer, help prevent runoff, and be more drought tolerant than annuals. Their production is expected to reduce tillage, which could positively affect biodiversity. End-use possibilities involve food, feed, fuel, and nonfood bioproducts. Fostering multidisciplinary collaborations will be essential for the successful integration of perennials into commercial cropping and food-processing systems.

It is widely known that numerous adaptive responses of drought-stressed plants are stimulated by chemical messengers known as phytohormones. Jasmonic acid (JA) is one such phytohormone. But there are very few reports revealing its direct implication in drought related responses or its cross-talk with other phytohormones. In this study, we compared the morpho-physiological traits and the root proteome of a wild type (WT) rice plant with its JA biosynthesis mutant coleoptile photomorphogenesis 2 (cpm2), disrupted in the allene oxide cyclase (AOC) gene, for insights into the role of JA under drought. The mutant had higher stomatal conductance, higher water use efficiency and higher shoot ABA levels under severe drought as compared to the WT. Notably, roots of cpm2 were better developed compared to the WT under both, control and drought stress conditions. Root proteome was analyzed using the Tandem Mass Tag strategy to better understand this difference at the molecular level. Expectedly, AOC was unique but notably highly abundant under drought in the WT. Identification of other differentially abundant proteins (DAPs) suggested increased energy metabolism (i.e., increased mobilization of resources) and reactive oxygen species scavenging in cpm2 under drought. Additionally, various proteins involved in secondary metabolism, cell growth and cell wall synthesis were also more abundant in cpm2 roots. Proteome-guided transcript, metabolite, and histological analyses provided further insights into the favorable adaptations and responses, most likely orchestrated by the lack of JA, in the cpm2 roots. Our results in cpm2 are discussed in the light of JA crosstalk to other phytohormones. These results together pave the path for understanding the precise role of JA during drought stress in rice.

Graminaceous arabinoxylans are distinguished by decoration with feruloylated monosaccha-ridic and oligosaccharidic side-chains. Although it is hypothesized that structural complexity and abundance of these feruloylated arabinoxylan side-chains may contribute, among other factors, to resistance of plant cell walls to enzymatic degradation, quantitative profiling ap-proaches for these structural units in plant cell wall materials have not been described yet. Here we report the development and application of a rapid and robust method enabling the quantitative comparison of feruloylated side-chain profiles in cell wall materials following mildly acidic hydrolysis, C18-SPE, reduction under aprotic conditions, and liquid chromatog-raphy with diode-array detection/mass spectrometry (LC-DAD/MS) separation and detection. The method was applied to the insoluble fiber/cell wall materials isolated from twelve whole grains: wild rice (Zizania aquatica L.), long-grain brown rice (Oryza sativa L.), rye (Secale cereal L.), kamut (Triticum turanicum Jakubz.), wheat (Triticum aestivum L.), spelt (Triticum spelta L.), intermediate wheatgrass (Thinopyrum intermedium, maize (Zea mays L.), popcorn (Zea mays L. var. everta), oat (Avena sativa L.) (dehulled), barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) (de-hulled), and proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.). Between 51 and 96% of the total esterified monomeric ferulates were represented in the quantified compounds captured in the feruloylat-ed side-chain profiles, which confirms the significance of these structures to the global arabi-noxylan structure in terms of quantity. The method provided new structural insights into cere-al grain arabinoxylans, in particular, that the structural moiety α-L-galactopyranosyl-(1→2)-β-D-xylopyranosyl-(1→2)-5-O-trans-feruloyl-L-arabinofuranose (FAXG), which had previous-ly only been described in maize, is ubiquitous to cereal grains.

Phenolic compounds and other antioxidants are of great interest since they have the potential to stabilize food products against lipid deterioration. Also, because many diseases such as diabetes and certain forms of cancer are linked to oxidative stress, phenolic compounds from food products and other plant sources are of interest for disease prevention. Thus, there is a demand to measure phenolic compounds in food products and to evaluate the antioxidant capacity of individual food constituents, extracts, and ingredients. Assays described in this chapter are of four types: (total) phenolics, hydrogen atom transfer-based antioxidant capacity assays, single-electron transfer-based antioxidant capacity assays, and accelerated lipid oxidation assays. Methods to determine the total phenolic contents of food products such as the Folin-Ciocalteu assay are unspecific and do not, depending on the overall composition of the food product, necessarily reflect the phenolic contents. Therefore, wherever possible, it is advised to study individual phenolic compounds by using various chromatography approaches. The chapter includes cautions regarding the types of antioxidant capacity assays used to screen compounds for delaying lipid oxidation and potential health benefits.