Highlight on Bottlenecks in Food Allergen Analysis: Detection and Quantification by Mass Spectrometry

Abstract

Food laboratories have developed methods for testing allergens in foods. The efficiency of qualitative and quantitative methods is of prime importance in protecting allergic populations. Unfortunately, food laboratories encounter barriers to developing efficient methods. Bottlenecks include the lack of regulatory thresholds, delays in the emergence of reference materials and guidelines, and the need to detect processed allergens. In this study, ultra-HPLC coupled to tandem MS was used to illustrate difficulties encountered in determining method performances. We measured the major influences of both processing and matrix effects on the detection of egg, milk, soy, and peanut allergens in foodstuffs. The main goals of this work were to identify difficulties that food laboratories still encounter in detecting and quantifying allergens and to sensitize researchers to them.

Food Allergen Analysis: Detection, Quantification and Validation by Mass Spectrometry

“…We have compared the areas of milk, egg, peanut and soy peptide peaks for three matrices with and without isotope labelled peptides. Our results clearly show that an isotope-labelled peptide is able to correct for matrix effects but not for effects linked to the extraction and digestion steps [85] planque et al…”

“…Furthermore, there subsist obstacles to the harmonization of allergen detection methods in food laboratories [85]. In April 2016, the AOAC SMPR 2016.002 guideline 'Standard method requirements for the detection and quantification of selected food allergens' was published.…”

“…On the other hand, the sensitivity can differ from one matrix to another. For example, in a study where cookie, ice cream and sauce were spiked with 0.5 mg milk proteins per kg, the observed S/N ratio was 26 for the cookie matrix, 83 for ice cream and 228 for sauce [85]. This also highlights the importance of a 'fit-for-purpose' description of an analytical method.…”

Critical review on proteotypic peptide marker tracing for six allergenic ingredients in incurred foods by mass spectrometry

“…The egg yolk has been rarely investigated so far, indeed only six studies were collected detecting specific egg yolk proteins, four of them developing a targeted approach (Planque et al,. 2016;Planque et al, 2017b;New et al, 2018;Planque et al, 2019), and two presenting only the identification of potential markers by HR-MS discovery analysis (Lee & Kim, 2010;Gavage et al, 2019). Luckily, most of them already tested a wide diversity of food matrices, with different complexity degree, such as cookie, bread, chocolate, salad dressing, spices, ham (see Table S2 for further details), also taking into consideration the ingredient inclusion before food processing.…”

Sesame, Pistachio, and Macadamia Nut: Development and Validation of New Allergenic Systems for Fast Real-Time PCR Application

“…Other limitations consist of the high frequency of false negatives relative to the matrix effect and protein denaturation or degradation in food processing with high temperature and pressure treatment and no possibility of analysis in a multiplex format [ 12 , 13 ]. Over the last few years, MS offers an approach of resonant interest as a potential confirmatory and direct quantitative method that can detect simultaneously multiple allergens [ 14 , 15 ]. However, it requires expensive equipment and highly trained analysts before a quantitative approach can be achieved.…”