Update on the Europrevall food allergen library: requirements for high quality allergens to improve in vitro diagnosis

Several expression systems were tested to obtain recombinant allergens in sufficient quantities and to facilitate purification. For food allergens from natural sources purification protocols were adopted and modified to obtain highly pure protein batches. All the natural and recombinant food allergens were tested for their physicochemical characteristics and had to meet certain quality standards before inclusion to the library. The previously established requirements improved the quality of the protein batches such as identifying and excluding co-migrating proteins with allergenic impurities, identifying threedimensional features relevant for IgE binding activity and characterising post translational modifications. This collection of well characterised food allergens will be used to improve the current in vitro diagnostic assays. These assays will be used to screen a representative number of sera from food allergic patients. The data will contribute to obtain comparable results for different patients’ groups and to update the IgE prevalence data for individual allergens.