Nanobody-based Food Allergen Surveillance: Current Status and Prospects

Abstract The incidence of food allergy increased in recent decades to drastically pose risk on sensitive individuals to result in allergic symptoms from mild to severe detection methods. Moreover, there is still no effective immune therapeutic strategy for food allergy, which addressed the accurate analytical methods to indicate their presence for the exposure prevention of sensitive individuals. Currently, the most applied detection method is immunoassay developed with food allergen specific antibodies, especially the conventional formats of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and polyclonal antibodies (pAbs), which dominantly serve as the detection reagents for food allergen analysis, whereas, with the deficiency on intensive laboring and cost, batch difference, significant cross-reaction, etc. The camelid derived nanobodies (Nbs) have attracted tremendous intention to explore their application in food hazard analysis since the robust characteristics like unique paratopes, high stability and affinity that extremely contribute to the beneficial effect. Whereas, the extensive analysis is needed to validate the potential employment of Nbs as detection reagents, and the advantages for food allergen surveillance. The previous reports have demonstrated the potential of Nbs for immunoassay development against food allergens, such as macadamia allergen of Mac i 1, peanut allergen of Ara h 1 and Ara h 3, lupine allergen of Lup an 1, milk allergen of β-lactoglobulin, etc. In this review, we systematically summarize the structural and biochemical properties of Nbs that benefit the application of Nb based immunoassay, as well as the representative detection strategies, to provide research data for the newly developed Nb formats for food allergen analysis, and prospect the future establishment of Nb-based surveillance against major food allergens comprehensively.