Towards development of incurred materials for quality assurance purposes in the analysis of food allergens

Food allergy and intolerance became very important problems in food safety and healthcare during the last few decades. Beside the pharmaceutical treatment of the symptoms, effective cure of these illnesses is the avoidance of the problematic food proteins. According to this reason, proper legislation is crucial for protecting sensitive people. In the European Union 14 allergenic components must be labelled which requires introduction of properly validated analytical methods for the appropriate quantification of allergenic proteins. The aim of our work is studying such parameters which may affect the analytical results, therefore have to be taken into account during the validation process. For investigating these issues, an incurred sample matrix was produced, namely a wheat flour based cookie, which contains allergenic proteins (milk or egg) in a dedicated amount. Using these samples the effects of food processing steps and the analytical performance of the applied Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) methods were studied. A major finding of our work is that heat treatment caused a large-scale decrease in the amount of measurable allergen content of the samples. The background of this phenomenon has not been clarified yet. Besides, the gathered data indicates that the performance of the ELISA method is highly related to the state of the sample matrix. These problems altogether must be taken into consideration for making a proper validation protocol and revealing their background also has a great importance in further evaluation of the analytical methods.