Forage and silage quality

There are two brown midrib mutants in pearl millet, one chemically induced (Chemey et al., 1988) and one spontaneous mutant (Degenhart et al., 1995). Analyses of the cell walls of these mutants bmr mutant indicated changes consistent with a reduction in COMT activity (Hartley et al., 1992 Degenhart et al., 1995 Lam et al., 1996), but the corresponding gene has not yet been cloned. 

Digestibility studies with brown midrib mutants of maize (Bames et al., 1971 Barriere et al., 1994 2004 Fontaine et al., 2003), sorghum (Porter et al., 1978 Akin et al., 1986) and pearl millet (Chemey et al., 1990 Akin et al., 1991) have indeed shown that some of the mutants are considerably more easily digestible. The fact that some of the mutants do not show much improvement indicates that not all changes in cell wall composition are automatically of practical use. 

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