Food Allergens’ Susceptibility to Proteolysis

Common properties of food allergens are prominent resistance to heat treatment and enzyme proteolysis. Stability of the proteins upon gastrointestinal proteolysis of food highly correlates with its allergenic potential. At this moment, the scientific community is putting a lot of effort to connect the available knowledge on the structure and function of food proteins, with stability to proteolysis in order to provide the most reliable prediction tool for allergenicity of novel proteins. Moreover, choosing the conditions under which gastrointestinal proteolysis is simulated may profoundly affect the results of assays and allergenicity assessment. At the beginning of research, for the link between allergenicity and proteolytic stability, purified allergens were used. However, this approchad was proved to be prone to production of erroneous data, since the proteolytic stability of purified proteins was frequently affected by the methodology used for protein purification and the ratio of protens to digestive enzymes used in the assays. Nowadays, the scientific community thrives to establish in vitro digestion protocols that mimic physiological conditions and take into account complex compositon of the food. New studies support this tendency, since it was shown that the presence of various biomolecules in food matrix affects the proteolysis in the simulated gastrointestinal conditions. On top of that, survival of intact proteins upon proteolysis seems not to be necessary, but frequently protein fragments of higher molecular weight with partially preserved structure might be enough to elicit allergic reaction in sensitized individuals.