Proteomics Applied to Food Allergen Research

Proteomics has been widely applied to the food safety field and recently exploited for food allergens analysis. Different workflows for allergen identification, characterization, determination of their post-translational modification, as well as their quantification have evolved over the years. In the past decade, the advent of modern mass spectrometry technologies also encompassing high-resolution mass analyzers, along with the improvement of bioinformatic tools and genomic data banks, widened the application fields enabling to expand the knowledges of food allergens from a biochemical, structural and clinical point of view. The typical routes are based on top-down and bottom-up proteomics. Whether top down proteomics is mostly used for allergen identification and for highlighting some post-translational or chemical modifications occurring along the protein moiety, the bottom-up route is instead commonly used for allergen quantification. An overview of the proteomics based strategy in food allergen analysis is provided in this article along with the discussion of the advancements done in this field and the bottlenecks.