Getting to the core of hard red winter wheat quality

As the wheat industry works to create more high-quality food products for consumers, it is necessary for plant breeders to develop new wheat varieties with improved milling and baking characteristics that maximize production efficiency while reducing dependency on vital wheat gluten or other flour additives. The purpose of this study was twofold: i) to test a popular belief that plant breeding, over time, has gradually produced varieties lacking the necessary characteristics – namely, dough strength – to allow migration from flour additives, and ii) to perform a specific assessment of gluten compression-recovery (CORE) analysis as a potential tool for wheat breeding programs to supplement industry-standard tests such as the farinograph. The farinograph and other recording dough mixers (RDMs) are used to make breeding decisions and are crucial to the success of a breeding program, a farmer’s operation, and the milling and baking industries. Through this project, we determined that gluten elasticity, a key metric of CORE analysis, increased at the rate of 1.6% per breeding generation since the introduction of the heirloom variety, Turkey, and thus countering claims that higher yielding varieties lack the gluten strength once present in breeding generations long ago. A second significant finding of this project was that CORE analysis revealed differences in gluten quality among commercial wheat varieties that were more difficult to detect with more traditional, but cumbersome, flour quality tests available through the farinograph, opening up the prospect for wheat researchers to use gluten compression-recovery analysis as a selection tool in variety development