Marianna Rakszegi holds a PhD in chemical sciences (2005) form the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She is a principal investigator of cereal chemistry at the Cereal Breeding Department of the Centre for Agricultural Research, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). As the leader of the quality lab, her main field is the identification and development of biochemical and molecular-biology tools to develop a more efficient selection system for quality-oriented wheat breeding. Her research mainly focuses on storage proteins, starch, dietary fibers and other bioacive components of cereals. She actively participated in several national and international projects, including the EU-FP6-Healthgrain project and the EU-FP7-SOLIBAM project, and she was a WP leader in the latest. She is the author of over 71 refereed papers cited over 2010 times and co-author of 16 book chapters. She is s guest associate editor at Frontiers in Plant Science and editorial board member of the Journal of Cereal Science. She is a co-breeder of 38 wheat and 2 spelt varieties. Recently she supervise 2 Phd students but also participates in the education of university students. . She won the János Bólyai Fellowship of the HAS twice, and also won the Zoltán Magyary postdoctoral Fellowship. She awarded the ’Researcher of the year 2017’ title in Veszprém Area, Hungary by the HAS. She is the member of the Eucarpia and the Committee on Plant Breeding, in the Section of Agricultural Sciences of the HAS.

Professional experience:

• cereal chemistry,
• quality oriented wheat breeding
• development of healthier cereal genotypes (high -amylose, -arabinoxylan or β-glucan)
• development of wheat with stronger dough (overexpression of Bx7 or Dx5, Ax1 HMW glutenin subunits (conventional or GMO)
• studies on wheat hardness (identifying factors and new alleles influencing kernel hardness)
• diversity analysis of breadmaking quality
• diversity analysis of dietary fibers (arabinoxylan, β-glucan) and their composition in cereals
• effect of heat and drought stress on compositional and processing quality traits
• effects of organic selection and production on cereal quality

Current research interest:

• molecular marker development for the selection of healthier cereal genotypes
• diversity of the health related components in spelt
• origin of spelt
• development of healthier cereal genotypes (mostly high-fiber)
• possible industrial applications of high amylose and/or high fiber wheat/barley genotypes
• diversity screen on old Hungarian wheat varieties
• effect of heat, drought and LED lights on wheat quality