Abstract
Gluten, which makes up 85% of endosperm wheat protein, is considered a crucial quality determinant of wheat-based food products. During wheat dough manufacture, the molecular packing of gluten causes formation of large structures that exceed the millimetre scale. However, due to lack of imaging techniques for complex systems composed of giant macromolecules, the entire gluten structure remains unknown. Here, we develop an optical clearing reagent (termed SoROCS) that makes wheat-based products transparent. Combined with two-photon microscopy, we image the three-dimensional (3D) structure of gluten at the size in the millimetre scale and at submicron resolution. Further, we demonstrate how the 3D structure of gluten dramatically changes from a honeycomb-shaped network to sparse large clumps in wheat noodles, depending on the salt added during dough making, thereby reducing stress when compressing the noodle. Moreover, we show that SoROCS can be used for noodle imaging using confocal laser scanning microscopy.
Highlights
Gluten, which makes up 85% of endosperm wheat protein, is considered a crucial quality determinant of wheat-based food products
Because polymerisation by the molecular packing of gluten causes the formation of large structures that exceed the millimetre scale during wheat dough manufacture[3,4], gluten plays a key role as a skeleton in wheat dough
Combined with two-photon microscopy, we image the 3D structure of gluten at the size in the millimetre scale and at submicron resolution
Summary
Gluten, which makes up 85% of endosperm wheat protein, is considered a crucial quality determinant of wheat-based food products. Because polymerisation by the molecular packing of gluten causes the formation of large structures that exceed the millimetre scale during wheat dough manufacture[3,4], gluten plays a key role as a skeleton in wheat dough These distinctive features of gluten provide wheat dough with a unique viscoelasticity[5], which allows us to produce various wheat-based foods and determines the intermediate and final quality of gluten-containing foods[6]. Several optical clearing reagents have been developed to reduce the amount of light scattering in biological samples, such as mammal brains and plants[13,14,15,16,17,18,19] They aim to remove or denature the high-RI components, such as proteins, lipids and chlorophyll, and to replace the solvent with a high-RI reagent. Combined with two-photon microscopy, we image the 3D structure of gluten at the size in the millimetre scale and at submicron resolution
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