Enzyme immunoadsorption assay (elisa assay)

ELISA technology has proven to be one of the most successful technologies for allergen detection, given its high sensitivity and specificity, and its low mg/kg levels in the detection and quantification of allergens.

This makes it a simple, relatively fast, high quality and high throughput method for allergen detection and quantification analysis.

It is one of the most widely used technologies for detecting and quantifying allergenic substances in products or foods by official food control agencies and by the food industry in their laboratories.

So far, ELISA assays have 2 validated kits for specific matrices:

• Peanut that may be present in ice cream, cookies, chocolate, cereals, etc.

• This test is under the direction of AOAC and EC JRC, PARK ET al 2005, POMS ET al 2005.

• Hazelnuts that may be present in ice cream, cookies, chocolate, cereals, etc. It is under the direction of the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety (BVL).

Even so, food laboratories often use many other kits for analysis. However, it should be noted that ELISA tests have some disadvantages, each test can only detect or quantify a single target allergen.

In other words, the resource expenditure is very high for those foods that may contain more than one allergenic substance, because a different ELISA assay would have to be performed for the detection of each of the allergens present.

In addition, many companies offer antibody kits with somewhat different specificities and sensitivities for the detection of a given allergen, so performing an ELISA assay with different kits may give divergent results.

An example of this is the test for gluten, where ELISA kits generally tend to generate divergent results. In this case, mass spectrometry (MS) could be used as an alternative method to confi