Simultaneous Detection of Eight Food Allergens Using Optical Thin-Film Biosensor Chips

Abstract

Food allergies are important food safety issues nowadays. To maintain the safety of people who experience allergic reactions, labeling is required in many countries and efficient and reliable detection methods are necessary. This paper reports a novel method for the rapid identification of food allergens through the use of a silicon-based optical thin-film biosensor chip with which color change results can be perceived by the naked eye without any extra equipment. The whole system can detect eight food allergens including soybean, wheat, peanut, cashew, shrimp, fish, beef, and chicken simultaneously. Sensitive and specific detection of the absolute detection limit of this method was 0.5 pg of cashew DNA, and the practical detection limit of 0.001%. The biosensor chip detection time was about 30 min after PCR amplification. The assay is proposed as a sensitive, specific, high-throughput, and ready-to-use analytical tool to detect the presence or confirm the absence of eight food allergens.

Recent Advances in the Detection of Allergens in Foods

“…Godoy-Navajas and coworkers [48] developed a long-wavelength fluoroimmunoassay to determine the presence of soy proteins in food samples employing nile blue-doped silica nanoparticles. Furthermore, an assay for the simultaneous identification of eight food allergens (soybean, wheat, peanut, cashew, shrimp, fish, beef, and chicken) by employing silicon-based optical thin-film biosensor chip was reported by Wang et al [49]. As the method allowed appreciating the change in color by the naked eye, there was not need of sophisticated equipment.…”

Detection of the peanut allergen Ara h 6 in foodstuffs using a voltammetric biosensing approach

“…Although there are some devices (immuno-and genosensors) described for the detection of some peanut allergens (e.g., Ara h 1, Ara h 3) [15][16][17][18][19], to the best of our knowledge, a biosensor for the specific detection of Ara h 6 was not described up to date.…”

Detection of Allergen Markers in Food: Analytical Methods

“…The major analytical Th methods, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), mass spectrometry (MS) and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are discussed in detail in this chapter. While the majority of commercially available allergen detection methods are single allergen assays, multi-allergen detection methods have recently been developed using a multiplex enzyme immunoassay [7][8][9][10], MS [11][12][13][14][15][16] or DNA amplifi cation [17,18]. Understanding fi the limitations of available methods for food allergen quantitation, specifi-fi cally with respect to sample extraction, thermal processing, and biomarker selection, will improve method selection, establish appropriate allergen control plans, and ultimately protect allergic consumers.…”