Fig. 2: Long-term intake of dAGEs promoted susceptibility to experimental food allergy.

BALB/c mice were fed either a control standard diet (SD) or a heat-treated high-AGE diet (HAGE) for 12 weeks before induction of experimental food allergy via i.g. gavage of model allergen OVA. a Schematic illustration of the study design^#. b Contents of AGEs in the serum and feces of mice upon 12 weeks of regimen (n = 5). c Clinical allergy score of mice upon last challenge (n = 7–8). d Serum total IgE level (n = 7–8). e Serum OVA-specific antibody level (IgE, IgG1 and IgG2a; n = 7–8). f Representative images of H&E and Toluidine Blue-stained intestinal sections; scale bar: 50 µm. g Mast cell counts per jejunum/colon section (n = 5). h Mass cytometry t-SNE analysis of MLN lymphocytes (equal sampling across groups, total over 225,000 events). i Average frequencies of specific immune cells in MLN lymphocytes (n = 3–4). j Spearman correlations between the frequency of immune cell subsets and levels of differentially expressed cytokines in MLN cells (n = 3–4). The R values were colorimetrically represented by scale at right. Bar graphs show mean ± SEM (b, e, i) and boxplots represent median with 25th/75th percentiles (box) and 1.5 × IQR (whiskers) (c, d, g). b Pair-wise comparison was conducted by Mann–Whitney tests (two-tailed); c–i Comparisons were performed using one-way ANOVA or Kruskal–Wallis test, followed by appropriate post hoc tests for pairwise comparisons. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. FDR-corrected q values were presented in correlation analysis. dAGEs dietary advanced glycation end-products, H&E hematoxylin and eosin, i.g. intragastric, MLN mesenteric lymph nodes, OVA ovalbumin, tSNE t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding. ^#Created in BioRender. Zhang (2025) https://BioRender.com/pf8iqnb. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.