Wheat - An Exceptional Crop

Herbert Wieser studied food chemistry at the University of Munich and completed his M.S. in 1970. He obtained a Ph.D. degree in food chemistry in 1974 from the Technical University of Munich. In 1973, he joined the German Research Center for Food Chemistry and was member, head and scientific advisor of the working group “structure/function relationships of biopolymers” until his retirement in 2017. Herbert Wieser´s major research interest focused on the chemistry of cereal proteins, in particular of gluten proteins, and structure/function relationships of these proteins. He had a special interest in celiac disease with focus on toxic protein structures. He published 330 original scientific papers and book contributions. He was awarded the Max-Rubner Award of the German Nutrition Society in 1984, the Osborne Medal of the AACC International in 2007, and the Neumann Medal of the German Association of Cereal Research in 2009. Peter Koehler is currently chairman of the Working Group on Prolamin Analysis and Toxicity and scientific advisor of the German Celiac Society. His research on celiac disease is focused on gluten analysis and gluten detoxification by means of enzymes. Katharina A. Scherf leads the Department of Bioactive and Functional Food Chemistry at the Institute of Applied Biosciences, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. Having studied food chemistry, she obtained her PhD degree from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and was a research group leader at the Leibniz-Institute for Food Systems Biology at the TUM. She was awarded with several scientific prizes including the Young Scientist Research Award of the Cereals & Grains Association in 2018 and the Research Award of the German Coeliac Society in 2014 and 2019.