Aptamer Biosensor for Antibiotic Residues Detection in Food Analysis

Antibiotics are widely used to kill or inhibit microorganisms, but their abuse results in various types of side effects in humans and the appearance of super bacteria with tolerance to antibiotics. Excess residual antibiotics in food products have become a serious problem, and so a more reliable, accurate, and easier detection system has been required. Aptamers have strong potential as sensitive bioprobes for the development of biosensors for antibiotics detection, a specially designed aptamer for an antibiotic may be suitable for this purpose. Aptamers are synthetic RNA or DNA single-stranded oligonu-cleotide sequences which can be generated by an in vitro selection process called SELEX (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by Exponential enrichment) technique. Antibiotics are small molecule targets, therefore, they cannot act as an antigen independently and high specificity and affinity antibiotics antibody are difficult to prepare. Aptamers have advantages over antibodies, such as easy chemical synthesis, easy modification, and less immunogenic response, thus, which can be considered as a valid alternative to antibodies receptors to bind to the target molecules with high affinity. In this review, we concentrated on recent advances made in detection and quantification of antibiotics residues with aptamers biosensor. In this paper, the preparation of aptamers biosensor, the selection of analysis methods and the detection of real samples are introduced in detail. Future prospects toward the development of selective, sensitive aptamers biosensor systems are also discussed. Copyright © 2013 IFSA.