With the gradually increasing prevalence of food allergy in recent years, food allergy
has become a major public health problem worldwide. The clinical symptoms caused by
food allergy seriously affect people's quality of life; there are unknown allergen
components in novel food and hidden allergens caused by cross contamination in food
processing, which pose a serious risk to allergy sufferers. Thus, rapid and multiplex
detection methods are required to achieve on-site detection or examination of allergic
components, so as to identify the risk of allergy in time. This paper reviews the
progress of high-efficiency detection of food allergens, including enhanced traditional
detection techniques and emerging detection techniques with the ability high-throughput
detection or screening potential food allergen, such as xMAP, biosensors, biochips,
etc. focusing on their sensitivity, applicability of each method in food, along with
their pretreatment, advantages, limitation in the application of food analysis. This
paper also introduces the challenges faced by these high-efficiency detection technologies,
as well as the potential of customized allergen screening methods and rapid on-site
detection technology as future research directions.
