Oat is generally considered to be a gluten-free cereal and suitable for most of celiac disease patients. To ensure the safety of gluten-free oats, a reliable method for detect and quantify the gluten contaminants is important. However, the current method is lack of certified reference material and leads to wrong estimation in some food matrices. This project aims to improve the current antibody-based quantification methods, and also develop new mass spectrometry-based methods.
The debate of the existence of toxic oat cultivars has been on in the past decade. This project will study if and how much celiac-harmful epitopes from different oat cultivars contain in genetic level and protein level. Moreover, we will assess the ability of the identified epitopes to active celiac patient T-cells and investigate the reliability of T-cell activation assay for the evaluation of the safety for celiac disease patients.
Research collaborators
Natural Resources Institute of Finland https://www.luke.fi/en/projektit/avepure/
University of Tampere https://www.tuni.fi/en/research/suitability-different-oat-cultivars-glu…
Industrial partners
Boreal Plant Breeding Ltd.
Fazer Group
Helsinki Mills Ltd.
Raisio Oyj
Valio Ltd.
Funding source
Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry