Study on the reduction of Tartary buckwheat allergenicity during Pediococcus pentosaceus fermentation by HPLC-MS/MS analysis

Abstract

Tartary buckwheat contains more valuable nutrients than common buckwheat, but it also contains allergenic proteins that induce allergic reactions through an IgE-mediated response. Our study demonstrated that fermentation by Pediococcus pentosaceus degrades allergenic proteins in Tartary buckwheat, as confirmed by HPLC-MS/MS analysis of polypeptides. Our results showed significant degradation of the protein after 16 h of Pediococcus pentosaceus fermentation (PP16), leading to a reduction in IgE-binding activity. Comparison with unfermented Tartary buckwheat (UTB) peptides yielded 2042 fragments, of which 756 fragments associated with allergenic proteins were upregulated. Among them, the expression of 213 fragments was reduced by 71.83%. By performing bioactivity prediction on potential allergenic peptide fragments, we identified six peptide fragments derived from Fagt 1, potentially contributing to the residual allergenicity in PP16. These suggest that Pediococcus pentosaceus fermentation can effectively destroy allergen epitopes and mitigate the allergenicity of Tartary buckwheat.

Keywords: Allergenicity; Fermentation; HPLC/MS-MS; Tartary buckwheat.

Fig. 1

Changes in pH (A), TTA (B), and the microbial profile (C) of Tartary buckwheat sourdoughs during fermentation for 24 h. The full lines represent the fitted values by the kinetic modeling and the symbols represent the experimental data. The estimated parameters of the kinetic model were shown in the box.

Fig. 2

SDS-PAGE analysis of Pediococcus pentosaceus fermented Tartary buckwheat protein (A) and Western blot of the fermented samples (B).