New OSU Wheat Varieties Could Lead to More Natural Bread With Fewer Additives

Do you ever feel frustrated when you look at the ingredient list on a loaf of bread because you don’t know what most of the ingredients are?

What if a bread product contained fewer ingredients?

A new trio of Oklahoma State University wheat varieties might just be the food solution for consumers interested in fewer additives — the substances added to food products during processing to help improve color, texture, flavor, or, in the case of bread, dough quality.

The use of the food additive called vital wheat gluten has increased over the past 20 years, making up 2%-20% of bread’s flour weight, depending on the product. Gluten additives are used in bread to improve the dough strength because the bread’s natural gluten is not enough to create strong, flexible bread products.

Brett Carver, regents professor and wheat genetics chair in the OSU Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, and his wheat breeding team began working with a naturally occurring genetic protein called Bx7oe in 2012. Bx7oe is an overexpressed protein, meaning cells produce larger amounts than what would normally be produced. The Colorado State University variety Snowmass that contained the gene was bred with the OSU wheat variety Gallagher, and the three varieties resulting from the match had a shocking effect.