The Amaranth Institute welcomes those working with amaranth to profile their work. If you would like to be included please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with a brief overview of your work with amaranth, your contact information and photos.

Jason Avent
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Phone: 512 771-5646

Jason will be presenting two talks on amaranth at the Amaranth Conference:

"Betalains- Bioavailable antioxidants with unique chemistry"
Betalain pigments are the vivid red, orange, purple and yellow pigments found in amaranth and only eight other plant families. These pigments are potent antioxidants that have already proved their value to human health. Because the chemistry of betalain pigments is so different from all other plant pigments there is excellent complementation between betalains and other more familiar antioxidants. These pigments do not compete for absorption into the gut and they have distinct functions that cannot be replaced simply with vitamin C. These pigments also function as color indicators of spoilage and oxidation; these have an important role as a very simple and effective "expiration indicator" and can be used outside of the United States without patent infringement.

"Amaranth Cultivation and Global Warming"
Amaranth is ideally suited to survive and thrive in an environment affected by climate change. For each calamity caused by climate change, there is an opportunity to cultivate amaranth rather than more traditional crop plants. Here is a list of physiological and nutritional aspects that make amaranth particularly well suited to our changing climate.

C4 metabolism - Well adapted for hot or high altitude environments.

Water conservation - Amaranths can survive drought, and then take advantage of a deluge.

Limestone - Amaranths thrive in limestone soils where most agriculture fails- effectively increasing the arable land.

"Different" nutrition - Amaranths provide a different protein quality, antioxidant pigments, leafy vegetable, etc. that helps round out the diet made from cereal grains.

Evolvability - Diverse cultivated and native stocks exist; thanks to excellent conservation efforts amaranth breeders should never get bored. Amaranth will continue to be adaptable to environmental change with low-tech breeding.

Mihai Costea, Ph.D
Assistant Professor & Curator of the Herbarium
Department of Biology
Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Avenue West,
Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5, Canada
Phone: 519 884-0710 ext. 2120 (herbarium), 3407 (office) or 2887 (lab)
Fax: 519 746-0677
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J. Pablo Morales-Payan, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Horticulture,
University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez Campus. PO Box 9030, Mayaguez PR 00681.
Phone: (787) 832-4040 x 2443
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Pablo's work with amaranths has been mostly on using exogenous physiological regulators (hormone-like compounds and biostimulant) and mineral nutrients to enhance the leafy (also called salad or vegetable) amaranths. He has also done some work on weed interference with leafy amaranths, which he thinks is an interesting twist: research about wild amaranths (weeds) competing with leafy maranths(crops). Current research involves leafy amaranths grown between rows of tropical fruit tree crop

Patrick Tranel
Department of Crop Sciences
University of Illinois
1201 W. Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
Phone: 217-333-1531
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