Authors: Elena Scaravelli Marcel Brohée Rosangela Marchelli Arjon J van Hengel
Publish Date: 2007/11/28
Volume: 227, Issue: 3, Pages: 857-869
Abstract
Hypersensitivity to peanut is a public health problem since the ingestion of even low amounts of peanut can trigger severe allergic reactions Allergic consumers rely on the information provided on the label of foodstuffs to identify products that might endanger their health In order to protect the allergic consumer methods are required for the detection of allergenic ingredients For this purpose we have developed three realtime polymerase chain reaction PCR assays based on TaqMan chemistry that are capable of detecting peanut specific DNA sequences in food products The peanut specific sequence targeted for detection is located within the gene family of the allergen Ara h 3 The occurrence of multiple Ara h 3 sequences in the peanut genome increases the chance to achieve a good sensitivity DNA extraction is also known to affect detection by PCR therefore the efficiency of several different DNA extraction methods was compared The methods reported here are capable of detecting 25 pg peanut DNA less than one copy of peanut genome equivalent and all three assays were successfully applied to detect peanut traces in a model food product where they could detect 10 mg kg−1 peanutWe would like to thank Dr Unbehend and Prof Lindhauer from the Institute for Cereal Potato and Starch Technology Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food—BfEL Detmold Germany for the production of the cookie model material and Prof Elke Anklam for her support for this study
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