Advances of Research on Glycinin and β-Conglycinin: A Review of Two Major Soybean Allergenic Proteins

Abstract

Being an important crop, soybean is widely used in the world and plays a vital role in human and animal nutrition. However, it contains several antinutritional factors (ANFs) including soybean agglutinin, soybean protease inhibitors, soybean allergenic proteins, etc., that may result in poor food utilization, decreased growth performance, and even disease. Among these ANFs, soybean allergenic proteins can lead to allergic reactions in human and animals, which has become a public problem all over the world, but our knowledge on it is still inadequate. This paper aims to provide an update on the characteristics, detection or exploration methods, and in vivo research models of soybean allergenic proteins; especially glycinin and β-conglycinin are deeply discussed. Through this review, we may have a better understanding on the advances of research on these two soybean allergenic proteins. Besides, the ingredient processing used to reduce the allergenicity of soybean is also reviewed.

Keywords:

• Allergenicity
• detection or exploration methods
• glycinin
• β-conglycinin
• in vivo research models
• ingredient processing

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of P. R. China (No. 31072037 and No. 31101719). The authors thank Elsevier for the permission to reuse Figure 1 in this manuscript. The authors also thank Xiao-lin Zhang for critical reading of the manuscript. And we appreciate the expert comments of the reviewers.