Newly expressed proteins in genetically engineered crops are evaluated for potential cross reactivity to known allergens as part of their safety assessment. This assessment uses a weight-of-evidence approach. Two key components of this allergenicity assessment include any history of safe human exposure to the protein and/or the source organism from which it was originally derived, and bioinformatic analysis identifying amino a...

A dogma has persisted for over two decades that food allergens are more stable to digestion compared with non-allergenic proteins. This belief has become enshrined in regulations designed to assess the allergenic risk of novel food proteins. While the empirical evidence accumulated over the last 20+ years has largely failed to confirm a correlation between digestive stability and the allergenic status of proteins, even those w...