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Noble Metal Nanomaterial-Based Aptasensors For Microbial Toxin Detection, Yue He, Cong-Ying Wen, Zhi-Jun Guo, Yu-Fen Huang

Journal of Food and Drug Analysis

Microbial toxins generated by bacteria, fungi and algae cause serious food-safety problems due to the frequent contamination of foodstuffs and their poisonous nature. Becoming acquainted with the contamination condition of foodstuffs is highly dependent on developing sensitive, specific, and accurate methods for targeting microbial toxins. Aptamers, obtained from systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX), have significant advantages for microbial toxin analysis, such as small size, reproducible chemical synthesis, and modification, as well as high binding affinity, specificity, and stability. Besides, aptamers have a predictable structure and can be tailored using biomolecular tools (e.g., ligase, endonuclease, exonuclease, …