Development of mass spectrometric methods for the identification and quantification of allergenic ingredients in food

The doctoral thesis deals with the "Development of mass spectrometric methods for the identification and quantification of allergenic ingredients in food". Due to the different existing food allergen labelling regulations a set of model food allergens was selected, namely milk, egg, peanut, hazelnut and walnut. This set covers food allergens from animal and plant origin. As immunoanalytical tools are at the moment the commercially available state-of-the-art to measure food allergens but with some methodological restrictions, the analytical focus of this work was the development of an in-laboratory confirmatory method for a selection of food allergens. The development included a common extraction protocol for a clinically-validated matrix and further the development of a validated multianalyte mass spectrometric method for in-laboratory confirmation for the selected food allergens. Therefore, the analytical targets, respectively proteins and peptides were identified and collected with focus on further Mass spectrometric multiplex analysis. As clinically relevant matrix chocolate dessert was chosen, produced and spiked with the selected food allergens. Novel allergen extraction protocols were developed to improve a flexible and reliable multiallergen extraction from the selected matrix. Further in-food proteolytic digestion models were developed for the obtained food extracts prior to MS-analysis. The MS-method was developed accordingly including marker identification, marker selection and MS-parameter optimisation. The final targeted LC-MS/MS method was validated for the detection and quantification of the five above mentioned allergenic ingredients. (author)