Recent advancements in lateral flow immunoassays: A journey for toxin detection in food

Abstract

Biotechnology embraces various physical and chemical phenomena toward advancement of health diagnostics. Toward such advancement, detection of toxins plays an important role. Toxins produce severe health impacts on consumption with high mortality associated in acute cases. The most prominent route of infection and intoxication is through food matrices. Therefore, rapid detection of toxins at low concentrations is the need of modern diagnostics. Lateral flow immunoassays are one of the emergent and popularly used rapid detection technology developed for detecting various kinds of analytes. This review thus focuses on recent advancements in lateral flow immunoassays for detecting different toxins in agricultural food. Appropriate emphasis was given on how the labels, recognition elements, or detection strategy has laid an impact on improvement in immunochromatographic assays for toxins. The paper also discusses the gradual change in sensitivities and specificities of assays in accordance with the method of food processing used. The review concludes with the major challenges faced by this technology and provides an outlook and insight of ideas to improve it in the future.

Microfluidic devices for sample preparation and rapid detection of foodborne pathogens

“…The LFA technology has been combined with various techniques, such as paper chromatography, chemical colorimetric assay, enzyme inhibition technology, immune-sandwich assay, biochemical and biomolecular reactions to facile pathogen detection in food samples (Cheng et al, 2014). Different types of labels, including gold, silver, and selenium nanoparticles, quantum dots, up-converting phosphors, fluorescent and luminescent materials, etc., are utilized as visualizing markers for LFAs to improve the sensitivity of detection (Quesada- González and Merkoçi, 2015;Tripathi et al, 2017). In a study performed by Wang et al (W. Wang et al, 2017), the test line of the nitrocellulose membrane was functionalized with monoclonal antibodies against P60 protein of Listeria, and L. monocytogenes monoclonal antibodies labelled with gold nanoparticles were used to specifically detect the pathogen using antibody-based sandwich concept.…”

Current trends in rapid tests for mycotoxins

“…LFAs are strong competitors on the market for mycotoxin detection (Tripathi et al 2018) nanoparticles, conjugated to anti-ZEN, anti-DON, and anti-T2 mAb, respectively, for ZEN, DON and T2 toxin detection. The LFA also gave a fast result (15 min) with a low falsenegative rate (<5%).…”

Mycotoxin Contamination of Beverages Obtained from Tropical Crops

“…Constant surveillance of beverages for the presence of mycotoxins would be prudent to reduce risks to human health. Alternative non-chromatographic analytical methods include bioassays and various immunochemical methods, surface plasmon resonance, fluorescence polarization [204], microarray chips, lateral flow [205][206][207], and nanoparticle-based biosensors [208]. Several new non-chromatographic techniques have been developed to assay mycotoxins in alcoholic beverages (e.g., nanostructured imaging surface plasmon resonance [209], multi-toxin immunoassay [210]), and could be easily implemented to assess contaminants in the matrices mentioned above.…”