Recent Advances in the Detection of Allergens in Foods

Abstract

Food allergy is a public health issue that has significantly increased worldwide in the past decade affecting consumers' quality of life and making increasing demands on health service resources. Despite recent advances in many areas of diagnosis and treatment, our general knowledge of the basic mechanisms of the disease remained limited, i.e., not at pace with the exponential number of new cases and the explosion of the new technologies. For sensitized individuals, the only effective way to prevent allergic reactions is the strict avoidance of the offending food. For this reason, a number of regulatory bodies in several countries have recognized the importance of providing information about the presence of food allergens by enacting laws, regulations, or standards for food labeling of "priority allergens." This has resulted in the need for the development of analytical methods for protection of food-allergic consumers that should be among others highly specific, sensitive, and not influenced by the presence of the food matrix components. Several analytical approaches target either the allergen itself or a corresponding allergen marker such as peptide fragment or gene segment and have been used in the detection and quantification of allergens in food products. In this short review, some of the conventional and new methods for the detection of allergens in food are listed and briefly discussed.

Phage Displayed Domain Antibodies (dAb) for Detection of Allergenic Pistachio Proteins in Foods

“…However, in contrast to other published immunoassays, that present a high cross-reaction with cashew (approximately 12% [5], or even higher than 90% [31]), the PVF4 phage-dAb does not cross-react with cashew. Hence, taken together these results suggest that the PVF4 phage-dAb ELISA is specific but not as sensitive as the previously developed real time PCR technique [11] for pistachio (0.1 mg kg −1 ), or other published ELISA methods using polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies [32].…”

Sesame, Pistachio, and Macadamia Nut: Development and Validation of New Allergenic Systems for Fast Real-Time PCR Application

“…On this basis, the development of suitable and specific analytical methodologies to ensure consumers protection and compliance with food labelling regulation is strictly necessary. The available approaches for the detection and quantification of food allergen are immunological, proteomics, and DNA-based tests, especially enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and lateral flow device, mass spectrometry (MS) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR), respectively [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]. ELISA is the most widely recognised and applied technique in routine analytical control for its high sensitivity, low cost, ease of use, and rapid result acquisition.…”

Effect of Instant Controlled Pressure Drop (DIC) Treatment on the Detection of Nut Allergens by Real Time PCR

“…The solubility of allergenic proteins is often affected by thermal treatments [9] and, as a consequence, the performance of protein-based detection methods, as ELISA, might be highly compromised. Moreover, cross-reactivity is often referred to in this technique [10]. Alternatively, DNA-based methodologies have been developed in the last years for many tree nuts such as indirect detection approaches, especially Real-Time PCR, due to its sensitivity and specificity.…”

“…DNA molecules are normally more stable to chemical and thermal processing and can be more efficiently extracted from raw and processed samples. For this reason, DNA-based assay is becoming a promising alternative to proteins for allergen detection in highly processed food samples [10]. To develop and validate the suitable performance of a Real-Time PCR assay for food allergen detection, the influence of thermal and non-thermal treatments on the target isolation and amplification should be analysed [12].…”