Allermatch, a unique user-friendly bioinformatics website for the automatic prediction of potential allergies of biotech products
At February 5, 2004, the Allermatch website (http://www.allermatch.org) was officially released on the Internet during the Allergy Matters 2004 conference in Wageningen, The Netherlands. Allermatch is a unique website where the amino acid sequence of a protein of interest can be compared with sequences of known allergenic proteins with the aim of predicting the potential allergenicity (capacity to cause allergy) of proteins introduced into genetically modified products. The user-friendly and time-saving features of the Allermatch website allow the user to enter the input sequence and obtain, by a few mouse-clicks, the outcomes of interest in an accurate, concise, and comprehensible format.
The Allermatch website carries out automatically the bioinformatics procedures recommended in 2003 by the Codex Alimentarius following the FAO/WHO Expert Consultation on allergenicity of foods derived through modern biotechnology in 2001. The protein sequence entered by the user is compared with 303 sequences of allergenic proteins stored in a database that has been constructed for this particular purpose. The database sequences have been obtained from the SwissProt Protein Knowledge Database and have been processed according to the recommendations of the Expert Consultation. The user can choose three modes of comparison: complete sequence matches (overall), partial sequence matches (80-amino acids sliding window), and exact matches of short stretches (for example, 6 amino acids). Relevant outcomes of the comparisons are provided to the user immediately.
The data generated by these procedures are commonly part of the safety dossiers that are submitted by companies that seek regulatory approval for genetically modified products. The outcomes of bioinformatic studies, besides other laboratory and clinical tests, have an important role in the "weight of evidence" approach to predict the likelihood that a genetically modified product may or may not provoke allergies. However, until the release of AllermatchTM, the methods used to generate the relevant data by bioinformatics have not been publicly available. Given that the recommended bioinformatics procedures require laborious preparations if carried out by each investigator individually, it is expected that the release of the AllermatchTM website will increase the accessibility and efficiency of these procedures, as well as increase the transparency of the regulatory framework for genetically modified products.
The Allermatchwebsite has been created in a joint collaboration between RIKILT - Institute of Food Safety and Plant Research International. These institutes contributed to the website using their experience with the safety assessment of genetically modified products and bioinformatics, respectively. Both institutes are part of Wageningen University and Research Center in The Netherlands, as well as participants in theAllergy Consortium Wageningen. Future activities will be aimed at raising funds for the purpose of extending the website with additional tools and features that allow for increased precision of the prediction of the potential allergenicity of peptide sequences, as well as other issues related to the safety of biotechnology.
The Allermatchwebsite can be visited at http://www.allermatch.org/
List of press releases for 2004