Maize Allergens during seed development: transgenic versus non-transgenic

Abstract

Recombinant DNA technology, also known as genetic engineering, allows the transfer of genes between unrelated species. As a result, a genetically modified organism (GMO) may contain one or more proteins coming from other organism/s. The application of genetic engineering to plants improvement and food production is becoming a common practice. New and diverse plant varieties have been obtained which are pest and disease resistant, more productive and with improved nutritional quality, flavour and shelf life. In spite of all these potential benefits, some apprehension persist regarding genetically modified organisms putative effects over human health and environment. One of the main concerns regards GMO’s potential allergenicity. One of the possibilities is that the introduction of a new/ altered gene may putatively alter the expression of others, namely endogenous allergens. In maize, there are already some proteins characterized as allergens, namely a lipid transport protein (Pastorello et al. 2000), a tioredoxin Zea m25 (Weichel et al. 2006), two glutelins Zea m27kD (Frisner et al. 2000) and 50kD Zein (Pasini et al. 2002) and one trypsin inhibitor (Pastorello et al. 2000). In this study, we have evaluated the expression of these 5 allergens, throughout MON 810 vs its non-transgenic counterpart seed development (10, 16 and 23 days after pollination). The expression profile of each one of these allergens varies during seed development, although the observed differences between Transgenic and Non-Transgenic maize were not statistical significant (t-test). Since there is a lack of experimental data regarding the correlation of allergen expression with food allergy clinical relevance, we are now comparing the immunologic response of maize allergic individuals against MON 810 maize vs its non transgenic control. We also intend to characterize the encountered potential maize allergens by mass spectrometry