Assessing food allergy risks of novel proteins

The use of transgenic proteins in food crops introduces potential food allergy risks and these must be assessed using internationally harmonised, science-based decision processes.

An ILSI/HESI workshop on the assessment of protein allergenicity was hosted late last year with the objective of updating participants on scientific advances and regulatory developments in this field. Recent research was presented at this workshop, and has been published in the journal Toxicological Science (DOI: 10.1093/toxsci/kfp075).

The safety assessment of novel food crops involves consideration of issues such as the source of the introduced protein, amino acid sequence homology comparisons to known allergens, physicochemical properties, protein abundance in the crop, and sometimes, specific IgE binding studies.

The paper describes a web-based tool that is now available which integrates information about allergenic proteins with a variety of computational tools. This tool could assist regulators in predicting protein allergenicity based on structural analysis.

Other areas of new research presented in this paper include optimising serum screening and animal models for the assessment of transgenic protein safety, plus the use of quantitative proteomics and basic mechanisms.