Ferenc Bekes

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation | CSIRO

Changes of water-soluble carbohydrate (WSC) content such as fructose, glucose, sucrose, maltose, nystose, raffinose, stachyose and fructan were analyzed in wheat kernels in Fusarium epidemic and non-epidemic seasons. In both season types, eight commercial fungicides were applied and three wheat varieties with differing Fusarium resistance were test...

Background and Objectives Gamma irradiation treatments are an effective option for sterilizing microbes and pests that damage wheat, however irradiation can alter the physical and nutritional properties of foods. In this study seven Australian wheat varieties were subjected to 0, 25, and 50 kGy treatments to examine the influence of high‐dose irrad...

Pure oats in gluten-free diets (GFD) represent important nutritional benefits for people suffering from celiac disease (CD). However, oat cultivars do not contain the typical CD-related wheat gliadin analog polypeptides. Emerging evidence suggests that oat cultivars containing gluten-like epitopes in avenin sequences may pose potential health risks...

The Brabender Farinograph is a well-recognized tool in cereal laboratories today, but its long development story goes back to the century before last, when a Scotsman, James Hogarth, developed and patented a “recording dough mixer” in 1889. It measured water absorption, dough development time, and mixing tolerance—all the key measures we still use...

Global climate change in recent years has resulted in extreme heat and drought events that significantly influence crop production and endanger food security. Such abiotic stress during the growing season has a negative effect on yield as well as on the functional properties of wheat grain protein content and composition. This reduces the value of...

The use of pure oats (oats cultivated with special care to avoid gluten contamination from wheat, rye, and barley) in the gluten-free diet (GFD) represents important nutritional benefits for the celiac consumer. However, emerging evidence suggests that some oat cultivars may contain wheat gliadin analog polypeptides. Consequently, it is necessary t...

The dietary intake of fermentable oligo-, di- and monosaccharides, and polyols (FODMAPs) can promote gut health, but also trigger gastrointestinal disorders. Wheat as a staple food is considered a major source of FODMAPs in the daily diet. The most abundant FODMAPs in the wheat grain are fructans, which accumulate during plant development in vegeta...

The protein composition of wheat grain is a primary determinant of its end-use quality. Grain proteins are also responsible for food-related disorders in humans, such as celiac disease, wheat dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis, food allergy and baker’s asthma. The effects of environmental conditions on grain protein composition have been extens...

Grain characteristics (hardness, protein content/quality, starch properties, enzymatic activity, etc.) play an important role in the definition of end use quality for wheat-based products. Among them, gluten strength and extensibility, mostly determined by glutenin and gliadin composition, are two of the main factors that determine gluten quality....

Grain characteristics (hardness, protein content/quality, starch properties, enzymatic activity, etc.) play an important role in the definition of end use quality for wheat-based products. Among them, gluten strength and extensibility, mostly determined by glutenin and gliadin composition, are two of the main factors that determine gluten quality....

Grain fructans play an important role in the physiology of wheat plants and also impact on the health of consumers of wheat-based products. Given the potential economic impor- tance of fructan levels, if genetic variability could be identi ed for this trait, it may be a potentially useful breeding target for developing climate-resilient and nutriti...

To understand wheat dough protein behavior under dual mixing and thermal treatment, solubility of Mixolab-dough proteins were investigated using nine extraction buffers of different dissociation capacities. Size exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC) and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) demonstrated that overall chang...

The efficiency of in vitro anther culture was screened in a full diallel population of four spelt wheat genotypes and ten F1 hybrids. Genotype dependency was observed based on the data of embryo-like structures (ELS), green-, albino plantlets. In the diallel population and ten F1 hybrids, the green plantlets production ranged from 13.75 to 85.00 an...

Consuming gluten-containing foods derived from wheat, barley, rye and possibly oats can result in health problems for a significant proportion of people. However, in the case of several types of disorders related to consuming gluten-containing cereals, not only the gluten components are trigger compounds. According to medical experts the majority o...

Consumption of ‘gluten-containing’ food causes disorders for a significant minority of people who consume foods derived from wheat, rye, barley and possibly oats. Recently the most successful innovation area in the baking industry is governed by the large demand on ‘gluten-free’ and low FODMAP products. Because of their chemical, nutritive and func...

Wheat grain proteins responses to mixing and thermal treatment were investigated using Mixolab-dough analysis systems with flour from two cultivars, Ventura-26 (normal amylose content) and Ventura-19 (reduced amylose content). Size exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC) and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) analysis re...

More than half of the world's protein supply is provided by the grain of cereal species, especially wheat, rice, and maize, and also by the wider range of cereal species. According to species, the grain proteins differ in nutritional value and in functional role in grain usage. Structural relationships between the cereal proteins follow taxonomic l...

The complex set of proteins known as gluten is the basis of wheat having the unique ability to form the viscoelastic dough that is needed for making bread, pasta, and many other wheat-based foods. Gliadin and glutenin, the subfractions of gluten, are each made up of many polypeptides, which are disulfide cross-linked in the case of glutenin. As a r...

Proteomics complements the analysis of gene expression by analyzing all the polypeptides (proteins) expressed by an organism's genome in a specific plant or grain tissue at a particular stage of development and under defined growth conditions. Diverse technologies have been developed for the fractionation and identification of the individual polype...

The fundamental basis of wheat flour utilization is its unique property of forming dough and developing hydrated gluten protein network when it is mixed with water. The main steps of the mixing procedures are the homogenization of ingredients, the formation of hydrated gluten protein–carbohydrate–fat complex structure in wheat dough, and occluding...

Proteomics complements the analysis of gene expression by analyzing all the polypeptides (proteins) expressed by an organism's genome in a specific plant or grain tissue at a particular stage of development and under defined growth conditions. Diverse technologies have been developed for the fractionation and identification of the individual polype...

Sequential protein behavior in the wheat dough matrix under continuous mixing and heating treatment used Mixolab-dough samples from two Australian wheat cultivars, Westonia and Wyalkatchem. High performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC) and two-dimensional gel electrophoresis (2-DGE) analysis indicated that 32 min (80°C) was a critical time point...

Transgenic rice seed expressing high molecular weight (HMW) glutenin subunit was generated and characterized to study the effects of the wheat prolamin on the protein expression pattern, the protein size distribution, the trafficking, and the deposition of the protein in the transgenic endosperm. The functional and rheological properties of rice fl...

Damaged starch, protein and arabinoxylan (AX) content and composition have been related to water absorption (WA) in a large set of samples. We tested 20 modern bread wheat cultivars bred in Hungary, 20 old Hungarian landraces, and 17 cultivars with special biochemical/functional characteristics from all around the world, this last set for internati...

Wheat is uniquely suited to the baking of leavened bread mainly because of its protein composition. The flour-forming endosperm contains storage proteins that form the gluten complex after grinding and mixing with water. Essential to the unique dough structure are the glutenin polypeptides that are disulfide cross-linked into polymers with a wide r...

The gluten composition of more than 8,500 wheat varieties is provided in two new databases on the AACC International website (www.aaccnet.org/ initiatives/definitions/Pages/Gluten.aspx). The databases augment earlier versions (1-3) by providing a program to screen the large volume of data. For each variety, the program provides the gliadin composit...

A wheat HMW glutenin subunit (HMW-GS) protein in transgenic rice expressing was characterised to study its effects on the protein size distribution and on the protein expression pattern of the rice endosperm; as well as on the functional and rheological properties of the rice flour and dough. Significant differences were found in the protein expres...

The characterization of the old Hungarian varieties and landraces is an important part of Hungarian cereal research and breeding. Analysis of these germplasms with the most up-to-date methodologies results a broad scale of diversity of glutenin alleles, which proves their genetic heterogenicity. Exploitation of this attribute is an untapped possibi...

Based on previous research on validating lab-on-A-chip data on wheat protein analysis, a comprehensive work has been carried out with the intent to demonstrate the potential of the technique for wheat related fundamental research, breeding and food industry. Sample preparation and separation methodologies were investigated for the main wheat polype...

The aim of this work was to compare the effects of incorporated wheat storage proteins on the functional properties of rice and wheat flours. The advantage of rice as a base flour compared to wheat is that it does not contain any wheat flour components and, therefore, has no interactive effect between wheat glutenin proteins. The incorporation of i...

The utilisation of microchip capillary electrophoresis has the potential to improve the capability of high throughput sample analysis of biomolecules. The aim of this study was to review this capability for cereal protein analysis. The commercially available lab-on-a-chip (LOC) technology was characterised in the separation of total proteins extrac...

In Australia in the early 1890s, the wheat breeder William Farrer and chemist Frederick Guthrie shared a vision of selecting cross-bred wheats for enhanced grain quality. Guthrie was the newly appointed chemist of the Department of Agriculture of the Colony of New South Wales. Their goal to select lines with good milling quality was difficult becau...

The glutenin allele gene-pool, the distribution of the individual alleles on the 6 loci coding for glutenin subunits and their combinations were determined in a sample population containing 107 cultivars bred and grown in Martonvásár, Hungary at the Agricultural Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The database is based on the r...

Raw material quality, which is influenced not only by the protein content, insoluble protein polymers, and glutenin-to-gliadin ratio but also by the starch granule size, is very important for the quality of bakery products. This study investigated the effect of high temperature and drought (during grain-filling) on the quality and components yield...

Expansins form a large multi-gene family found in wheat and other cereal genomes that are involved in the expansion of cell walls as a tissue grows. The expansin family can be divided up into two main groups, namely, alpha-expansin (EXPA) and beta-expansin proteins (EXPB), with the EXPB group being of particular interest as group 1-pollen allergens...

The genetic and phenotypic relationships among wheat quality predictors and sponge and dough bread making were evaluated in a population derived from a cross between an Australian cultivar 'Chara' and a Canadian cultivar 'Glenlea'. The genetic correlation across sites for sponge and dough loaf volume was high; however, phenotypic correlations acros...

Fifteen winter wheat varieties (12 hard and 3 soft genotypes) produced in Martonvásár were selected to study the effect of milling on flour starch properties. Differences in protein and starch content, flour yield, water absorption, starch damage, particle size and pasting properties were studied. Significant difference was observed in the starch p...

Cloning and functional analysis of high molecular weight wheat glutenin subunit (HMW-GS) 1By8 from Italy durum cultivar Simeto was carried out in this study. All HMW-GS from Simeto were separated and characterized by appropriate electrophoresis methods, reversed-phased high performance liquid chromatography (RP-HPLC) and mass spectrometry (MS). The...

The objective of this work was to develop a rice flour based procedure for in vitro structure-function studies of wheat proteins. Rice flour has an advantage over wheat flour, because the signal/noise ratio should be higher after the incorporation of the wheat prolamins into the protein matrix of the dough. A reduction/oxidation procedure has been...

BACKGROUND: Recent developments in micro-scale testing methodology and in methods modelling the effects of native forms of constituents by in vitro methods have provided a new approach to study the impact of added foreign proteins on dough end-use quality. Amaranth (Amaranthus) is a member of the pseudo-cereal family, whose storage proteins have su...

The word protein means primary substance, according to Mulder and Berzelius, who proposed the name in 1838 (Tracey 1967). However, the study of wheat proteins has a longer history, starting with the famous description of gluten published by Jacopo Beccari, professor of chemistry at the University of Bologna, in 1745 (Beccari 1745). In his article “...

Near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy of single seeds of cereal grains would allow their quality testing to be performed at earlier stages in breeding programmes than at present and for seeds of individual Lines to be sorted into fractions of contrasting quality. Previous single-kernel NIR research involving cereals has been directed at traits such as p...

While the effect of protein content and composition on the functional properties of wheat flour is well studied, our knowledge on the same properties of rice flour is limited. This work was conducted to study the relationship between the dough mixing properties of flour from different rice cultivars and protein content and composition. An efficient...

Structure and composition of wheat storage proteins and functional properties of wheat gluten are well studied; therefore several methods and instruments are available to determine these properties. The investigation of functional properties of rice proteins, depending on the different goal of utilisation, has not been well established, yet. In thi...

Ten transgenic lines were studied which expressed a transgene encoding HMW subunit 1Ax1 in three elite spring wheat cultivars: Imp, Canon and Cadenza. These lines contained one to five copies of the transgene and the 1Ax1 subunit was expressed as 1–20% of the total glutenin protein. These lines were grown in field trials in a continental, arid clim...

A micro Z-arm mixer and a 2g-Mixograph were used to compare the effect of pin and Z-arm-type mixing actions on mixing properties of wheat flour dough. Although the two mixing curves obtained with pin-and Z-arm-type mixing action showed a very similar mixing trace, no significant correlation was found between the two mixers other than the number of...

We generated and analysed transgenic rice lines synthesizing substantial amounts of high-molecular-weight glutenin subunit (HMW-GS) from wheat. Particle bombardment has been used to transform rice cultivars (Orysa sativa L.) with a cassette carrying the gene of 1Dx5 HMW glutenin subunit. Twelve independent lines were recovered and PCR results on ge...

Gluten confers on flour the ability to produce viscoelastic doughs. The molecular weight distribution (MWD) of gluten proteins is one of the main determinants of physical dough properties. Size-exclusion high performance liquid chromatography (SE-HPLC) is routinely used to evaluate this parameter. A proper, highly efficient solubilization protocol...

In the course of breeding, a number of genetic resources have been used to investigate the effect of the overexpressed allelic form of the Bx7 high molecular weight glutenin encoded by Glu-B1 on dough strength, stability and extensibility. Biochemical marker selection was carried out using RP-HPLC on breeding lines in the F3 –F4 and F5 –F7 generati...

Symmetrical-flow field-flow fractionation analysis was used to estimate the molecular size distribution (MSD) of glutenin from Australian wheat cultivars. The high molecular weight end of the MSD is important for predicting dough quality, but is difficult to measure by most characterization methods. Two parameters were considered to quantify the hi...

This book brings together recent, international contributions to the study of gluten proteins from leading experts in the field. Gluten proteins have gained greater importance due not only to their fundamental role in determining technological quality of wheat end products, but also to the apparently increased number of people showing different deg...

Many years of research on the gluten proteins of wheat have provided a large number of research publications, many of them including information about the composition of gliadins and glutenin subunits in a wide range of wheat genotypes. This information is potentially valuable for many of the purposes described in this book, e.g., pursuit of popula...

The way a dough behaves when flour and water are initially mixed, and during further processing, are vitally important in determining the food quality of the end product. Rheology is the study of the flow of a material, which is deformed over time when a strain is applied. Dough is a viscoelastic polymer and hence its properties depend on how quick...

The low-molecular weight (LMW) glutenin subunits are major determinants of the viscoelasticity of durum wheat gluten, and therefore of its technological quality, with both quantitative effects and qualitative effects. We have modified the LMW glutenin subunit composition of the durum wheat cultivar Ofanto by expression of a transgene encoding a B-t...

Doubled haploid lines (n = 160) from a cross between wheat cultivars 'Cranbrook' (high dough extensibility) and 'Halberd' (low dough extensibility) were grown at three Australian locations. The parents differ at all high- and low-molecular-weight glutenin loci. Dough rheological parameters were measured using small-scale testing procedures, and qua...

The transgenic line B73-6-1 (developed and characterized by UK scientists) contains 10–15 extra copies of a native HMW glutenin gene (1Dx5) with an approximately four-fold increase in the amount of the encoded protein. The technological and rheological properties of this line and the non-transformed control line were studied in a continental type,...

This study applied the use of a new small-scale apparatus, the micro Z-arm mixer, which has analogous mixing action to that of the traditional ValorigrafTM and FarinographTM. A novel methodology for the prediction of water absorption replacing the traditional titration method has been developed, exploiting the constant slope of the relationship bet...

The extension testing of wheat-flour dough has become one of the key cereal chemistry links to end product quality assessment, because of its perceived relevance to baking performance, and because of the various correlations that have been inferred and assumed since the extensibility of a dough was first investigated in the late 19th century. As a...

The low-molecular-weight (LMW) glutenin subunits are components of the highly cross-linked glutenin polymers that confer viscoelastic properties to gluten and dough. They have both quantitative and qualitative effects on dough quality that may relate to differences in their ability to form the inter-chain disulphide bonds that stabilise the polymer...

High-molecular-weight glutenin subunits (HMW-GS) are important determinants of wheat dough quality as they confer visco-elastic properties to the dough required for mixing and baking performance. With this important role, the HMW-GS alleles are key markers in breeding programs. In this work, we present the use of a PCR marker initially designed to...

Transgenic wheat lines showing over-expression of HMW glutenin subunits provide useful tools to investigate the effects of changes in the ratio of x : y subunits on functional dough properties. Titration experiments were carried out to incorporate purified subunit 1Dy10 into transgenic lines showing over-expression of subunit 1Dx5 (B73-6-1 and B73-...

Differential scanning calorimetry was used to evaluate the effect of storage at 10°C, 20°C and 30°C, and 40% and 65% relative humidity (RH) on adzuki bean starch gelatinisation and protein denaturation temperatures. Storage for 6 months at an elevated storage temperature (30°C) caused increases in the starch gelatinisation onset temperature (To) an...

Bnkti 1201, an old Hungarian wheat variety with special quality traits, was analysed to determine the relationships between its storage protein composition and superior quality-attributes for breadmaking. Based on the storage protein composition, the variety appears to have the nature of a population, containing several genotypes with different glu...

Analysis of a cDNA library from wheat cv Wyuna endosperm, indicated a significant size and sequence variation among seed-endosperm protein genes. In this study, a family of low-molecular-weight seed protein genes are analysed that are related to the gliadins and the low-molecular-weight glutenin subunits. Sequence analysis and comparison of these p...

The gene encoding high-molecular-weight (HMW) subunit 1Bx20 was isolated from durum wheat cv. Lira. It encodes a mature protein of 774 amino acid residues with an M(r) of 83,913. Comparison with the sequence of subunit 1Bx7 showed over 96% identity, the main difference being the substitution of two cysteine residues in the N-terminal domain of subu...