Development of Allergen Database for Food Safety (ADFS): An integrated database to search allergens and predict allergenicity

Allergy has been one of the most common chronic health problems in recent years, and the introduction of recombinant proteins into foods and other products has raised public concern about the induction of allergy. Prediction of food allergenicity is very important but still unsatisfactory. By using an enormous amount of data produced by genomic, functional, and structural studies, bioinformatics can provide useful insights into allergenicity. We have developed a web server database system which is comprised of allergenic proteins for food safety and homology search tools, "Allergen Database for Food Safety (ADFS)". Since ADFS includes the sequences of known allergens and B-cell epitopes, a potential allergenicity of a novel protein in food should be detected by homology search. The database contains allergens classified into 8 categories (pollen, mite, animal, fungus, insect, food, latex, and others), together with the public database accession numbers of their genes, and their epitope and 3D-structure information. Users can easily search allergens with keywords and amino acid sequences through the graphical interfaces. 1) URL: http://allergen.nihs.go.jp/ADFS/.