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PAKISTAN – GM WHEAT RESEARCH
Genetic engineering of wheat to improve dough making
6 April 2007. Source: Institute of Food Technologists [UK]
www.ift.org/news_bin/news/newsFrames.php
The viscoelastic properties of gluten proteins underline the utilization of wheat to prepare bread and other wheat flour based foodstuffs. One group of gluten proteins is glutenin, which consists of high molecular weight (HMW) and low molecular weight (LMW) subunits. The HMW glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) are particularly important for determining dough elasticity. The common wheat possesses 3 to 5 HMW subunits encoded at the Glu-1 loci on the long arms of group 1 chromosomes (1A, 1B, and 1D).
The presence of certain HMW subunits is positively correlated with good bread-making quality. Glutamine-rich repetitive sequences that comprise the central part of the HMW subunits are actually responsible for the elastic properties due to extensive arrays of interchain hydrogen bonds. A group of researchers from Pakistan used genetic engineering to manipulate the amount and composition of the HMW subunits, leading to either increased dough strength or more drastic changes in gluten structure and properties. Journal of Food Science.
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