Rye rye harvesting was a manual task performed with scythes or sickles. The cut rye was often shocked for drying or storage, and the threshing was done by manually beating the seed heads against a floor or other object. Like wheat, barley, and their hybrids and derivatives, rye contains gluten, which makes it an unsuitable grain for consumption by people with gluten-related disorders, such as celiac disease, non-celiac gluten sensitivity, and wheat allergy, among others. Nevertheless, some wheat allergy patients can tolerate rye or barley. Ergotism is an illness that can result from eating rye and other grains infected by ergot
Gluten immunochemistry include: LTP (albumin/globulin), thioredoxin-hB, and wheat flour peroxidase. A particular 5 residue peptide, Gln-Gln-Gln-Pro-Pro motif, has been found to be a major wheat allergen. New immunogenic motifs appear in the literature almost monthly and new gliadin and "Triticeae" protein sequences appear that contain these motifs. The HLA DQ2.5 restricted peptide "I I Q P Q Q P A Q" produced approximately 50 hits of identical sequences in NCBI-Blast search is one of a several dozen known motifs whereas only a small fraction of Triticeae gluten variants have been examined. For this reason the immunochemistry is best discussed at the level