Aptamers: A Promising Tool for Ochratoxin A Detection in Food Analysis

Abstract

The contamination of food and feed by mycotoxins has become an increasingly serious problem. Mycotoxins represent a major risk to human and animal health, as well as economics. Herein, we focus on Ochratoxin A (OTA), which is one of the most common mycotoxins contaminating feed and foodstuffs. OTA is a secondary metabolite produced by various Aspergillus and Penicillium strains. Upon ingestion, OTA has a number of acute and chronic toxic effects. It is nephrotoxic, teratogenic, immunosuppressive, and carcinogenic (group 2B). As a consequence, some regulatory limits have been introduced on the levels of OTA in several commodities. The toxic nature of OTA demands highly sensitive and selective monitoring techniques to protect human and animal health. As alternative to traditional analytical techniques, biochemical methods for OTA analysis have attained great interest in the last few decades. They are mainly based on the integration of antibodies or aptamers as biorecognition elements in sensing platforms. However, aptamers have gained more attention in affinity-based assays because of their high affinity, specificity, stability, and their easy chemical synthesis. In this brief review, we present an overview of aptamer-based assays and their applications in OTA purification and detection, appeared in the literature in the last five years.

Electrochemiluminescence biosensor for ultrasensitive determination of ochratoxin A in corn samples based on aptamer and hyperbranched rolling circle amplification

“…Aptamers exhibit significant advantages over antibodies such as easy synthesis, low cost, target versatility and thermal stability under a broad array of conditions. Since Cruzaguado firstly obtained the aptamer of OTA in 2008 (Cruz-aguado and Penner, 2008), various rapid and sensitive methods for of OTA detection had been reported (Tong et al, 2011;Prabhakar et al, 2011;Castillo et al, 2012;Rhouati et al, 2013).…”

Comparison of In-Solution Biorecognition Properties of Aptamers against Ochratoxin A

“…Briefly, the first promising aptamer candidate was a 36-mer sequence (designated as 1.12.2) with a reported dissociation constant ( K D ) in the nanomolar range [25]. To date, this aptamer has been integrated into several applications for OTA analysis, including colorimetric, electrochemical, electrochemiluminescent, fluorescent biosensors, enzyme-linked assays and affinity chromatography approaches [28]. Next, two other OTA aptamer sequences (designated as H8 and H12) were reported by Barthelmebs et al [26].…”

Ligand Assisted Stabilization of Fluorescence Nanoparticles; an Insight on the Fluorescence Characteristics, Dispersion Stability and DNA Loading Efficiency of Nanoparticles

“…Table 5 provided the DNA loading capacity of unmodified, BSA modified and PEG modified nanoparticles. This finding opens the door for several applications of this technology, since DNA ligands have been widely used as recognition elements in many fields, such as food safety, drug delivery, therapy and other biomedical applications [31].…”