Food Safety: Advances in Methods for Determination of Allergens in food by LC-MS/MS

In this webinar, Linda Monaci Phd and Dr. Rosa Pilolli, researchers at CNR-ISPA, will discuss about recent developments for the determination of allergens in food.

Food allergy is an increasing health problem due to its growing prevalence worldwide. EU Regulation No.1169/2011 established the list of 14 allergenic ingredients (and by-product) whose presence must be indicated in the respective food labels. Current legislation does not address the accidental contamination of allergens due to cross-contamination occurring along the entire food chain therefore, the risk of allergen contamination is likely to exist. In order to protect consumers’ health, different countries have set their own action levels for several allergens establishing reference doses for egg, milk, tree nuts, peanut, and soybean.

There is a need for methods that accurately detect allergens in food. Targeted LC-MS/MS-based methods demonstrated relevant advantages over commonly used techniques such as PCR and ELISA for allergen analysis, including multiplexing capability, increased sensitivity and accuracy.

With the use of appropriate markers LC-MS/MS offers the advantages of:

• i) unambiguous identification of the allergen through the detection of signature peptides for each allergen
• ii) multi-target analysis through detection of multiple peptide markers in one run
• iii) allergen quantification through the quantification of the signature peptides.

In this webinar we illustrate methods with optimized sample preparation and liquid chromatography separation coupled with laminar flow tandem mass spectrometry (MS) for the detection and quantitation of milk and egg allergens in in processed food products.

Presenter: Dr. Rosa Pilolli (CNR-ISPA)

Presenter: Linda Monaci Phd (CNR-ISPA)