A comprehensive review on glycation and its potential application to reduce food allergenicity

Abstract

Food allergens are a major concern for individuals who are susceptible to food allergies and may experience various health issues due to allergens in their food. Most allergenic foods are subjected to heat treatment before being consumed. However, thermal processing and prolonged storage can cause glycation reactions to occur in food. The glycation reaction is a common processing method requiring no special chemicals or equipment. It may affect the allergenicity of proteins by altering the structure of the epitope, revealing hidden epitopes, concealing linear epitopes, or creating new ones. Changes in food allergenicity following glycation processing depend on several factors, including the allergen’s characteristics, processing parameters, and matrix, and are therefore hard to predict. This review examines how glycation reactions affect the allergenicity of different allergen groups in allergenic foods.

Keywords:

• Glycation
• food allergy
• food allergens
• allergenicity reduction

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their thanks to Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2022QC125) and the High-level Talent Start-up Fund from Qingdao Agricultural University.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2022QC125) and the High-level Talent Start-up Fund from Qingdao Agricultural University.