creator Meng Xu advisor Fu, Tong-Jen Stability to heat or other food processing conditions has been suggested as one of the characteristics of food allergens, however there is in general a lack of standardized approach to determine or compare the thermal stabilities of food allergens. This study evaluated the use of several analytical tools including the BCA total protein assay, Far-UV Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy, Differential Scanning Calorimetry, and inhibition ELISA assays to study the changes in the structural and immunological properties of major allergens as a result of heat treatments, and identified parameters that can be used to quantify and compare the thermal stability of food allergens. Purified allergens from milk, egg, and almond were subjected to moist-heat or dry-heat treatments and changes in protein solubility, IC50 values and thermodynamic properties of each protein were determined. It was found that high transition temperature (Tm) was closely related to a greater resistance to changes in immunological properties after heat treatments, suggesting that it can be a good parameter to quantify and compare the thermal stability of different food allergens. Submitted by Liana Khananashvili (khananashvili@iit.edu) on 2013-10-17T21:02:10Z No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis--MX.pdf: 1195586 bytes, checksum: 0ba073557a3e2ae026f448110f884fa9 (MD5) signed title page-MX.pdf: 112555 bytes, checksum: ea00c52feccc631a3ed5d28c569158ec (MD5) Made available in DSpace on 2013-10-17T21:02:10Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 thesis--MX.pdf: 1195586 bytes, checksum: 0ba073557a3e2ae026f448110f884fa9 (MD5) signed title page-MX.pdf: 112555 bytes, checksum: ea00c52feccc631a3ed5d28c569158ec (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-05 M.S. in Food Safety and Technology, May 2013 2013-04-24 2013-05 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/3101 en Thesis born digital application/pdf In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/ Restricted Access NCFST / National Center for Food Safety and Technology Illinois Institute of Technology Affiliated department