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The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), Washington DC, USA has developed a publicly accessible database of crop composition data by compiling their existing analytical data. Their crop composition database contains data for assessing the compositional equivalence of new crop varieties, as well as documenting the broad natural variability in the composition of conventional crops. The database has 70,000 data points on 102 nutritionally important analytes (eg. amino acids, carbohydrates, fatty acids, fibre, minerals, vitamins, etc.) for maize, cottonseed and soybean samples obtained from controlled field trials in multiple worldwide locations. The database is searchable on a number of attributes including analyte, matrix, year of harvest, and field location. |
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The Bioinformatics for Food Safety (BIFS) database at the National Centre for Food Safety and Technology, Chicago, USA takes a broad approach to sequence inclusion because it was initially constructed to support allergenicity assessments for GM foods and as a tool for testing and validating query methods. The database is structured to allow the identification of complete, non-redundant data sets for food and non-food allergens. |
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The Food Allergy Research and Resource Program (FARRP) Protein Allergen Database at the University of Nebraska, USA contains a list of publicly known allergens. Each entry is identified by the source organism, protein name, allergen designation (if available) and is linked (through a Gene Identifier number) to an accession in Entrez at NCBI. FARRP allows users to compare a sequence to an allergen database on-line (using the FastA program). The database contains a comprehensive list of unique proteins of known and putative allergens (food, environmental and contact) and gliadins that may cause celiac disease. Some entries are from published studies demonstrating clear clinical cause and effect for some individuals with a history of allergy to the source material, whilst others are where the authors of an abbreviated note or a sequence database entry claim that protein is an allergen or binds IgE without published proof. However, proteins that are merely similar in sequence to an allergen (homologues) are not included in the database. |
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Allermatch™ is a unique website where you can compare the amino acid sequence of a protein of interest with sequences of allergenic proteins. This website carries out automatically the procedures for predicting the potential allergenicity of proteins by bioinformatics approaches as recommended by the Codex alimentarius and FAO/WHO Expert consultation on allergenicity of foods derived through modern biotechnology. The unique features of the Allermatchtm website allow the user in a user-friendly and time-saving manner to enter the input sequence and retrieve, with a few mouse-clicks, the outcomes of interest in an accurate, concise, and comprehensible format |
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The Structural Database of Allergenic Proteins (SDAP) is a Web server that integrates a database of allergenic proteins with various computational tools that can assist structural biology studies related to allergens. SDAP is an important tool in the investigation of the cross-reactivity between known allergens, in testing the FAO/WHO allergenicity rules for new proteins, and in predicting the IgE-binding potential of genetically modified food proteins. Using this Internet service through a browser, it is possible to retrieve information related to an allergen from the most common protein sequence and structure databases (SwissProt, PIR, NCBI, PDB), to find sequence and structural neighbors for an allergen, and to search for the presence of an epitope other the whole collection of allergens. |
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Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands, hosts “the Biosafety Files”, a joint project by Plant Research International and RIKILT. It consists of three interlinked databases accessible through a side menu (Gene Files, Botanical Files and Food Files), thereby combining knowledge on the DNA-level, the crop level and the final product level. Gene Files is a database with background information, and is limited to seven genes regularly appearing in GM crops. Food Files contains information on food safety aspects of a few GM crops, including composition analysis (on one GM maize crop), animal tests (of two variants of CPSPS protein in either GM soybean or maize), potential allergenicity of novel proteins (one in silico study of CP4-EPSPS protein), and stability of foreign DNA and proteins (one study of CP4 EPSPS protein stability in vitro gastric and intestinal fluid). See “environmental databases” for the Botanical Files. |
| There are numerous databases that address general toxicological issues (e.g. U.S. National Library of Medicine), and the “Bad Bug Book”). Although they were not initially created to reflect potential toxicity resulting from a genetic modification, they are particularly relevant to food safety. |
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