Research Progress on the Epitope Mapping Technology for Food Allergens

Epitopes is the material basis of allergens. Epitope mapping technology is the tool for studying allergen epitopes, which involves epitope mapping and epitope prediction. In recent years, there have been some newly emerging epitope mapping technologies include phage display techniques, mass spectrometry, surface plasmon resonance, protein microarray and nuclear magnetic resonance. Compared with the traditional epitope mapping technology, they have advantages of high sensitivity and accuracy as well as rapidity. Epitope prediction is a prediction of allergen epitopes achieved by means of the bioinformatics methods. This paper reviews the applications of the aforementioned epitope mapping technologies in epitope prediction and research progresses on epitope prediction.