Sustainable agricultural practices in wheat cultivation, such as green manuring and crop rotation with soy and mustard, offer environmental benefits by reducing pesticide and herbicide usage. However, these practices introduce risks of allergen cross-contamination in wheat-based products.
Researchers in Italy have worked to establish a robust and validated analytical approach for the detection of soy and mustard allergens in wheat flour. The technique, based on liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (LC-MS), detects newly-identified marker peptides unique to allergenic proteins in mustard and soy and enables the simultaneous quantification of multiple allergens in a single analysis. According to the researchers, this method avoids the limitations of other allergen detection techniques such as ELISA that can return false positives due to interfering substances present in complex matrices or from treatments such as heat processing.
The method has undergone thorough validation for linearity, limit of detection (LOD), limit of quantification (LOQ), recovery, repeatability, and reproducibility, as well as potential matrix and processing effects. It is able to identify and quantify soy and mustard allergenic proteins in complex, processed food matrices, including naturally contaminated flour and baked goods.
Reference: Bianco et al. Contamination of Wheat Flour and Processed Foodstuffs with Soybean and Mustard Allergenic Proteins. International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2025; 26(8):3891. DOI: 10.3390/ijms26083891
