A research has been conducted on several hundreds of cultivars and selection lines of bread wheat to find out new varieties of better nutritive characteristics. For a coarse evaluation of protein quantity and quality, a screening method (dyebinding capacity, DBC) was utilized. On the same samples, nitrogen was determined also by the Kjeldahl method; in some cases aminoacids analysis was carried out. A very high correlation was found between protein content and DBC and, even higher in this case, between DBC and lysine content (in samples with a high DBC). In this way it has been possible to sort out a certain number of varieties of interest from a nutritive standpoint and in relation to their protein and essential amino acids contents. The importance of these findings is discussed.