Effect of oxidation in the presence or absence of lipids on hazelnut and soybean protein detectability by commercial ELISA

Soybean and hazelnut represent major food allergens. Their inadvertent presence
in foods might pose a serious threat to allergic consumers. Therefore, reliable
detection methods are needed. Commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) are the preferred methods especially by the food industry and
enforcement agencies for the detection of contamination levels of food allergens.
However, they are susceptible to erroneous results due to the modification of the
allergens (proteins) during food processing. In this paper, the impact of protein
oxidation on the detectability of soybean and hazelnut was investigated. Lipid-induced oxidation did not have a great impact on the detectability while the more
severe hypochlorous acid-induced oxidation led to dramatic decrease in detectability for both hazelnut and soybeans. The observed impact was highly
dependent on the type of ELISA kit used.