[Analysis of proteins in food with electrophoretic and chromatographic methods]

The efficiency of electrophoretic methods (gel electrophoresis, isoelectric focusing, twodimensional techniques) and of chromatographic methods (size exclusion and ion exchange chromatography, reversed phase HPLC) to analyze proteins in foods is reviewed. Several selected applications are discussed in detail. The large diversity of proteins in a particular food results in a unique electrophoretic or chromatographic pattern, that can be used for identification purposes, by means of the so called indicator proteins. The adaptability and resolving power of the methods assure their extended application to many protein containing foods. The uniqueness of the patterns obtained warranties differentiations of even closely related animal or plant foods as well as mixtures of them. The methods also allow quantitative determinations of mixtures of foods. Their ease of handling and good reproducibility and reliability favours their use in routine analyses. Numerous investigations on fish, meat and derived products, non-meat proteins in meat products, milk, cheese, cereals and products made of cereals, oilseed proteins, legumes, fruits and vegetables described in the literature are here presented.