Within recent years, large efforts have been allocated to the development of more effective conversion technologies for cereal straw into ethanol. We have already shown that considerable differences between modern cultivars from southern Scandinavia in terms of ethanol potential exists, indicating that the conversion efficiency can be improved by breeding. The next step towards improved straw quality for bioethanol production could be to study old cultivars from the same area to see if the variation in this material is larger and genetic useful. NIR spectroscopy has proven useful as a fast method to characterize the chemical composition of feedstock for bioethanol production.

The purpose of the current presentation is to compare the variation in straw quality of modern wheat cultivars from southern Scandinavia with the variation found in old cultivars from the same area.

The Nordic Genebank supplied us with 97 bread wheat cultivars from southern Scandinavia entering the market during 1910 to 1990. The old cultivars were sown in 1 m² plots and straw was collected at harvest. From 107 modern cultivars, straw was collected from experiments at two other sites. Straw samples were ground and measured on a NIRsystem 6500 in the range 400-2500 nm.

The NIR spectra were transformed to reduce the effect of light scattering and were analyzed with principal component analysis to reveal differences between cultivars in terms of chemical composition.