Recent Advances in the Detection of Allergens in Foods.
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.
Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
Silvia
S
de la Cruz
Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
Inés
I
López-Calleja
Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
Rosario
R
Martín
Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain.
Isabel
I
González
School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham, Sutton Bonington Campus, Leicestershire, Nottingham, UK.
Marcos
M
Alcocer
Facultad de Veterinaria, Departamento de Nutrición, Bromatología y Tecnología de los Alimentos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Av. Puerta de Hierro s/n, 28040, Madrid, Spain. tgarcia@ucm.es.
Teresa
T
García
D000485:Allergens / Q000032:analysis* / Q000737:chemistry*; D000818:Animals; D005512:Food Hypersensitivity / Q000517:prevention & control; D005515:Food Labeling / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D011788:Quality of Life
D000485:Allergens
Allergens; Analytical methods; ELISA; Food allergy; Mass spectrometry; Sensitization