Dataset Information

Consumer-friendly food allergen detection: moving towards smartphone-based immunoassays.

ABSTRACT: In this critical review, we provide a comprehensive overview of immunochemical food allergen assays and detectors in the context of their user-friendliness, through their connection to smartphones. Smartphone-based analysis is centered around citizen science, putting analysis into the hands of the consumer. Food allergies represent a significant worldwide health concern and consumers should be able to analyze their foods, whenever and wherever they are, for allergen presence. Owing to the need for a scientific background, traditional laboratory-based detection methods are generally unsuitable for the consumer. Therefore, it is important to develop simple, safe, and rapid assays that can be linked with smartphones as detectors to improve user accessibility. Smartphones make excellent detection systems because of their cameras, embedded flash functions, portability, connectivity, and affordability. Therefore, this review has summarized traditional laboratory-based methods for food allergen detection such as enzyme-linked-immunosorbent assay, flow cytometry, and surface plasmon resonance, and the potential to modernize these methods by interfacing them with a smartphone readout system, based on the aforementioned smartphone characteristics. This is the first review focusing on smartphone-based food-allergen detection methods designed with the intention of being consumer-friendly. Graphical abstract A smartphone-based food allergen detection system in three easy steps (1) sample preparation, (2) allergen detection on a smartphone using antibodies, which then transmits the data wirelessly, (3) analytical results sent straight to smartphone.

SUBMITTER: Ross GMS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6096701 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Consumer-friendly food allergen detection: moving towards smartphone-based immunoassays.

Ross Georgina M S GMS Bremer Monique G E G MGEG Nielen Michel W F MWF

Analytical and bioanalytical chemistry 20180326 22

In this critical review, we provide a comprehensive overview of immunochemical food allergen assays and detectors in the context of their user-friendliness, through their connection to smartphones. Smartphone-based analysis is centered around citizen science, putting analysis into the hands of the consumer. Food allergies represent a significant worldwide health concern and consumers should be able to analyze their foods, whenever and wherever they are, for allergen presence. Owing to the need f ...[more]

PMID: 29582120

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Project description:BackgroundTo improve the sustainability performance of food systems, both consumption- and production-side changes are needed.ObjectivesTo this end, we assessed multiple sustainability impacts of 6 consumer strategies together with production-side aspects such as organic and circularity principles for Switzerland.MethodsTwo strategies encompassed dietary changes: following a pescetarian diet and adhering to the national dietary guidelines. Two strategies employed alternative farming systems: increasing the share of organic production and, in addition, applying the circularity principle of avoiding feed-food competition by limiting livestock feed to low-opportunity-cost biomass. A fifth strategy reduced food waste. The sixth strategy increased the share of domestic produce. For all strategies, we assessed greenhouse gas emissions, land use, nitrogen surplus, social risks, diet quality, and diet costs.ResultsThe strategies revealed trade-offs between impact categories, unless combined in a synergistic way. Whereas dietary changes towards more plant-based diets reduced environmental impacts (≤51%) and increased diet quality (≤57%), they increased social risks due to increased sourcing from contexts with potentially bad labor conditions (≤19%). Further, when the share of organic produce was increased, land use and dietary costs were increased (≤33% and ≤42%, respectively). The effect on land use could, however, be reversed when circularity principles were introduced in addition to the organic production standard, resulting in reductions for all environmental indicators (≤75%). Reducing food waste and increasing the share of domestic produce led to better sustainability performance as well, but at lower orders of magnitude.ConclusionsCombining all proposed strategies could lead to substantial favorable changes on all impact categories assessed, but would require a thorough transformation of the current food system. However, the sum of individual consumers each following only 1 of the strategies proposed would make an important contribution towards improving the sustainability performance of the Swiss food system.

Project description:The increasing prevalence of individuals with multiple food allergies and the need to distinguish between foods containing homologous, cross-reactive proteins have made the use of single-analyte antibody-based methods (e.g., ELISAs) sometimes insufficient. These issues have resulted in the need to conduct multiple analyses and sometimes employ orthogonal methods like mass spectrometry or DNA-based methods for confirmatory purposes. The xMAP Food Allergen Detection Assay (xMAP FADA) was developed to solve this problem while also providing increased throughput and a modular design suitable for adapting to changes in analytical needs. The use of built-in redundancy provides the xMAP FADA with built-in confirmatory analytical capability by including complementary antibody bead sets and secondary analytical end points (e.g., ratio analysis and multi-antibody profiling). A measure of a method's utility is its performance when employed by analysts of varying expertise in multiple laboratory environments. To gauge this aspect, a multi-laboratory validation (MLV) was conducted with 11 participants of different levels of proficiency. The MLV entailed the analysis of incurred food samples in four problematic food matrices, meat sausage, orange juice, baked muffins, and dark chocolate. Except for a couple of instances, involving two confirmatory components in the analysis of baked muffins, the allergenic foods were detected by all participants at concentrations in the analytical samples comparable to ≤ 10 μg/g in the original food sample. In addition, despite high levels of inter-lab variance in the absolute intensities of the responses, the intra-laboratory reproducibility was sufficient to support analyses based on the calibration standards and direct comparison controls (DCCs) analyzed alongside the samples. In contrast, ratio analyses displayed inter-laboratory %CV (RSDR) values < 20%; presumably because the ratios are based on inherent properties of the antigenic elements. The excellent performance of the xMAP FADA when performed by analysts of varying proficiency indicates a reliability sufficient to meet analytical needs.

Dataset Information

Consumer-friendly food allergen detection: moving towards smartphone-based immunoassays.

Publications

Consumer-friendly food allergen detection: moving towards smartphone-based immunoassays.

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