Who discovered the gluten and who discovered its production by lixiviation?

Abstract

The discovery of the preparation of the complex material known today as “gluten” was wrongly described in many important texts in the history of food chemistry, either because the name of the authors was misspelled or because dates were wrong. Historical data show that gluten was discovered by Jacopo Bartolomeo Beccari, in Bologna (Italy) in 1728. However, the lixiviation process still used today to get gluten and the chemical characterization of this new material was performed by the physician Johannes Kesselmeyer in Strasbourg (France), in 1759. The discovery of gluten was considered as very important because both scientists thought that they had demonstrated that gluten was of “animal origin”, contrary to starch, which was thought to be of plant origin. Kesselmeyer tried to avoid this paradox of finding animal products in plants.