NICOLE Copping developed a pioneering way of testing for traces of peanuts in food during her Biomedical Sciences degree.
Nicole, from Northgate Village in Chester, won the Institute of Biomedical Sciences President’s Prize after excelling throughout her studies, culminating in her receiving a First Class Honours degree at Chester Cathedral today.
The undoubted highlight for the 27-year-old came during the completion of her dissertation, which involved the development of a new method of testing for the presence of peanuts in food.
With peanut allergies affecting around 1.3 per cent of adults in the UK and USA, warning labels alerting sufferers to the presence of peanuts in food are vital, but it is believed that the current methods of detection allow traces in certain foods to go undetected.
Testing, however, indicates that Nicole’s research provides a more reliable testing method, and her work has already attracted interest from a European pharmaceutical company.
The study was carried out as part of an on-going programme of research undertaken by members of the University’s Environmental Quality & Food Safety Research Unit. Some of Nicole’s data was included in a paper presented by the University’s Professor Graham Bonwick at the 10th International Conference on Agrifood Antibodies at the University of Wageningen.
She said: “There are a number of detection methods employed to test food products for the presence of peanut proteins, which are the allergenic portion of the peanut.
Many of these methods are in the form of an ELISA, a biochemical technique, but there has been some speculation around the sensitivity of such test kits, and it has been seen in some foods that the efficient extraction of peanut proteins is reduced, leading to lower detection rates.
“The method I’ve devised tests for a different allergen, however, which is found in abundance within peanuts. Its detection within a food product would successfully determine the presence of peanut, in an arguably more reliable way than currently available testing methods.
“There is not currently an ELISA available to detect it, so during the course of my dissertation a new ELISA was developed and tested.
“I was warned that the research often takes time, but I was getting results within a few weeks, which was really exciting.”
Nicole, who has recently started work as a Project Co-ordinator at ALcontrol Laboratories in Hawarden, is hoping to study for a PhD in the future.