Isolation of food allergens

The identification of food allergens is a priority in the management of foo d allergy, because of the need to obtain standardized extracts and pure all ergens for diagnosis and therapy. It is thus important to develop methods f or purification of allergenic molecules in order to study their biological and immunological characteristics. Protocols for protein extraction from fo ods and for allergen purification are reviewed in this paper. We report pub lished methods for extraction of allergens from either animal and vegetable foods and detailed purification methodologies including ion-exchange, gel filtration and reversed-phase chromatography of well known allergens. (C) 2 001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.