**7.5 Assessment of potential allergenicity**

The assessment of allergenicity reaction is important to release a GMO crop. A variety of factors considered for an overall assessment of allergenic potential is conducted. This assessment includes a safety of the genes source, protein structure (e.g. amino acid sequence identity to human allergens) and stability of the protein to pepsin digestion *in vitro*, heat stability of the protein, glycosylation status, and specific IgE binding studies with sera from relevant clinically allergic subjects [45]. Since GM crops were first commercialized over 20 years ago, there is no proof that the introduced novel protein(s) in any commercialized GM food crop has caused food allergy. The process by which allergy assessment has been conducted since the 1990s has involved guidance from several expert scientific bodies, including the FAO/WHO [46], and Codex [22]. However, several animal models are important for investigating the etiology of food allergy as well as evaluating advances in immunotherapy techniques to induce desensitization and ultimately, tolerance to food allergic reactions [47]. Now days, Bioinformatics tools has led to advances in predicting the allergenicity of novel proteins.
