Mitigating the allergenicity of peanut allergen Ara h 1 by cold atmospheric pressure argon plasma jet

Abstract

BACKGROUND Peanut allergy is recognized as a major food allergy that triggers severe and even fatal symptoms. Avoidance of peanuts in the diet is the main option for current safety management. Processing techniques reducing peanut allergenicity are required to develop other options. Cold plasma is currently considered as a novel non‐thermal approach to alter protein structure and has the potential to alleviate immunoreactivity of protein allergen. RESULTS The application of a cold argon plasma jet to peanut protein extract could reduce the amount of a 64 kDa protein band corresponding to a major peanut allergen Ara h 1 using sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis, but the overall protein size distribution did not change significantly. A decrease in peanut protein solubility was a possible cause that led to the loss of protein content in the soluble fraction. Immunoblotting and enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay elucidated that the immunoreactivity of Ara h 1 was significantly decreased with the time treated with plasma. Ara h 1 antigenicity reduced by 38% after five scans (approximately 3 min) of cold argon plasma jet treatment, and the reduction was up to 66% after approximately 15 min of treatment. CONCLUSION The results indicate that cold argon plasma jet treatment could be a suitable platform for alleviating the immunoreactivity of peanut protein. This work demonstrates an efficient, compact, and rapid platform for mitigating the allergenicity of peanuts, and shows great potential for the plasma platform as a non‐thermal technique in the food industry. © 2023 Society of Chemical Industry.

A comprehensive review on novel synthetic foods: Potential risk factors, detection strategies, and processing technologies

“…The antigenicity of Ara h 1 and Ara h 2 was reduced by up to 39.32% and 46% in whole peanuts and by up to 65% and 66% in defatted peanut flour. Similarly, Hsu et al (2023) studied the effect of CP on peanut allergen Ara h 1 and the results revealing a reduction in antigenicity of up to 66% after a 15 min treatment. Meanwhile, CP has been found to reduce the allergenicity, TIA, and agglutinin activity in soymilk (Anbarasan et al, 2023;Liu et al, 2021;Xu et al, 2022).…”