Developing a molecular diagnostic tool for wheat breeders to help in predicting wheat varieties with reduced gluten intolerance

A considerable number of people, primarily in western populations, chose to follow gluten free diets these days and wheat flour products have gained the reputation of being controversial food. Prevalence of gluten related food disorders, e.g. Coeliac Disease, Wheat Allergy, Gluten Intolerance etc. have increased in the last 20 years and modern wheat varieties are often blamed. It is claimed that intensive wheat breeding during and since the green revolution has changed wheat from a safe nutritious food to one that has become allergenic. Gliadins are the principal immunoreactive fraction of gluten, due to the high content of specific immune reactive peptide sequences (epitopes) in their primary structures. Methodologies including Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (MALDI-TOF), Liquid Chromatography MS MS (qTOF), and Reverse and Size Exclusion High Performance Liquid Chromatography, using Data Explorer, Genomic WorkBench, Excel, UniProt and ProPepper software were used to develop a breeder’s too, to quantify gliadin content and composition of wheat cultivars and determined their immunoreactive epitope content. Using this tool, a small highly toxic ω-gliadin group was discovered, and the immunoreactive epitopes of its members were mapped. The allergenicity of 170 wheat cultivars was estimated, using this tool and it was clearly shown that historic wheat varieties are potentially as immunoreactive as the more recently released cultivars. Australian wheat breeding companies can now use this tool, to select varieties with low immunoreactivity.