Percent amino-acid identity thresholds are not necessarily conservative for predicting allergenic cross-reactivity.
International guidance on assessing amino-acid sequences for allergenic cross reactivity, such as that provided by Codex, relies on percent amino-acid identity across local alignments. Previous work has shown this approach to exhibit poor selectivity for true allergen cross-reactivity. Here we provide a hypothetical example illustrating that this approach is also not necessarily conservative in detecting high similarity across amino acid sequences, and thus, is not necessarily conservative in detecting potential allergenic cross reactivity among proteins. It is recommended that an established local-alignment bioinformatic tool like FASTA be used in conjunction with statistical measures of similarity to detect the risk of a protein cross-reacting with an allergen.
Dow AgroSciences LLC, 9330 Zionsville Road, Indianapolis, IN 46268, USA. Electronic address: raherman@dow.com.
Rod Aaron
RA
Herman
Dow AgroSciences LLC, 9330 Zionsville Road, Indianapolis, IN 46268, USA.
Ping
P
Song
Dow AgroSciences LLC, 9330 Zionsville Road, Indianapolis, IN 46268, USA.
Siva
S
Kumpatla
D000485:Allergens / Q000737:chemistry*; D000595:Amino Acid Sequence; D000596:Amino Acids / Q000737:chemistry*; D019295:Computational Biology; D003429:Cross Reactions; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D016415:Sequence Alignment
D000485:Allergens; D000596:Amino Acids
Allergens; Bioinformatics; Cross-reactivity; Genetically modified; Regulation