History of safe exposure and bioinformatic assessment of phosphomannose-isomerase (PMI) for allergenic risk

Abstract

Newly expressed proteins in genetically engineered crops are evaluated for potential cross reactivity to known allergens as part of their safety assessment. This assessment uses a weight-of-evidence approach. Two key components of this allergenicity assessment include any history of safe human exposure to the protein and/or the source organism from which it was originally derived, and bioinformatic analysis identifying amino acid sequence relatedness to known allergens. Phosphomannose-isomerase (PMI) has been expressed in commercialized genetically engineered (GE) crops as a selectable marker since 2010 with no known reports of allergy, which supports a history of safe exposure, and GE events expressing the PMI protein have been approved globally based on expert safety analysis. Bioinformatic analyses identified an eight-amino-acid contiguous match between PMI and a frog parvalbumin allergen (CAC83047.1). While short amino acid matches have been shown to be a poor predictor of allergen cross reactivity, most regulatory bodies require such matches be assessed in support of the allergenicity risk assessment. Here, this match is shown to be of negligible risk of conferring cross reactivity with known allergens.