Current Status of Wheat Allergy Research

Wheat is one of major crop and wheat flour is used to various end-use products such as bread, cookies and noodles due to its unique characteristic of it as elasticity and viscosity. Wheat consumption has been generally increasing in not only US and Europe but also Korea. Nevertheless, gluten proteins in wheat endosperm are cause of allergy by food ingestion. Hence, studies on the allergy have been conducting and have been attracting public attention. Herein, we report studies on research trend of the issue with research papers over the last decade for suggestion of future research direction. Since 2012, studies on allergy of gluten proteins have been dramatically increased based on the number of published papers related to the issue. As results of research activities by country, the Europe accounted for 60% corresponding to the number of papers. Next US (13%), Japan (9%), China (5%), and Korea (2%) came. In Korea, studies on allergy of gluten protein are less studied. In the field of studying of gluten allergy, there are two major technologies as preclinical technology and genome research accounted for 58% and 26%, respectively. In Korea, the study on glutenin proteins which is closely related to wheat allergy is actively performed. Therefore, it can be expected that research will be become more active.