Identifying wheat varieties with low acrylamide potential

Maillard reactions are responsible for the formation of many compounds in food that have been baked at temperatures above 120°C1. Some of these compounds are sought for their contribution to the organoleptic qualities of food but others, such as acrylamide, have been identified since 1986 as reprotoxic, genotoxic and carcinogenic in animals2.
Synthesized from a chain reaction between free sugars and free asparagine, acrylamide has been found in many food such as products prepared from wheat flour1,3,4.
The correlation between the amount of free sugars and free asparagine in raw food with the acrylamide content in the baked food has been well documented5. For this reason we compared the levels of 15 wheat varieties and identified wheat varieties with significantly lower level (=0.05) in acrylamide precursors. Those varieties could therefore be used preferentially in products intended for food.