IntroductionTwo of the major unanswered questions in food allergy research are what makes one person, and not another, become allergic and what are the attributes of some foods and food proteins that make them more allergenic than others? Seeking to answer these questions is much more difficult than investigating the allergenic potency of inhalant or contact allergens since the proteins involved in sensitising or elicting allergic reactions may have undergone extensive modification during food processing and be presented within complex structures within food.These physicochemical changes will alter the way in which they are broken down during digestion and may modify the form in which they are taken up across the gut mucosal barrier and presented to the immune system. Certainly the structure of the food matrix can have a great impact on the elicitation of allergic reactions and fat-rich matrices may affect the kinetics of allergen release, potentiating the severity of allergic reactions (Grimshaw et al., 2003). However, because of its complex nature the impact of food processing and the food matrix on allergenicity of proteins has only recently become a subject of research. Such investigations are fraught with difficulties, not least the fact that food processing often renders food proteins insoluble in the simple salt solutions frequently employed in serological or clinical studies. As a consequence our understanding of the impact of food processing on allergenicity is limited to the more soluble and extractable residues in foods and the allergenic potential of insoluble protein complexes is virtually unstudied despite representing the vast bulk of food proteins consumed.
Proteins in fabricated food structuresMuch of our understanding of the effects of food processing on food protein structure and the fabrication of different types of food structure has been gained from studying model food,