Selective Binding and Elution of Aptamers for Pesticides Based on Sol-Gel-Coated Nanoporous Anodized Aluminum Oxide Membrane

A comprehensive review of aptamer screening and application for lateral flow strip: Current status and future perspectives

The detection of biomarkers is of great significance for medical diagnosis, food safety, environmental monitoring, and agriculture. However, bio-detection technology at present often necessitates complex instruments, expensive reagents, specialized expertise, and prolonged procedures, making it challenging to fulfill the demand for rapid, sensitive, user-friendly, and economical testing. In contrast, lateral flow strip (LFS) technology offers simple, fast, and visually accessible detection modality, allowing real-time analysis of clinical specimens, thus finding widespread utility across various domains. Within the realm of LFS, the application of aptamers as molecular recognition probes presents distinct advantages over antibodies, including cost-effectiveness, smaller size, ease of synthesis, and chemical stability. In recent years, aptamer-based LFS has found extensive application in qualitative, semi-quantitative, and quantitative detection across food safety, environmental surveillance, clinical diagnostics, and other domains. This review provided a concise overview of different aptamer screening methodologies, selection strategies, underlying principles, and procedural, elucidating their respective advantages, limitations, and applications. Additionally, we summarized recent strategies and mechanisms for aptamer-based LFS, such as the sandwich and competitive methods. Furthermore, we classified LFSs constructed based on aptamers, considering the rapid advancements in this area, and discussed their applications in biological and chemical detection. Finally, we delved into the current challenges and future directions in the development of aptamer and aptamer-based LFS. Although this review was not thoroughly, it would serve as a valuable reference for understanding the research progress of aptamer-based LFS and aid in the development of new types of aptasensors.

Advanced screening and tailoring strategies of pesticide aptamer for constructing biosensor

The rapid development of aptamers has helped address the challenges presented by the wide existed pesticides contaminations. Screening of aptamers with excellent performance is a prerequisite for successfully constructing biosensors, while further tailoring of aptamers with enhanced activity greatly improved the assay performance. Firstly, this paper reviewed the advanced screening strategies for pesticides aptamers, including immobilization screening that preserves the native structures of targets, non-immobilized screening based on nanomaterials, capillary electrophoresis-systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (CE-SELEX), virtual screening in silico, high-throughput selection, and rational secondary library generation methods, which contributed significantly to improve the success rate of screening, reduce the screening time, and ensure aptamer binding affinity. Secondly, the precise tailoring strategies for pesticides aptamers were modularly elaborated, containing deletion, splitting, elongation, and fusion, which provided various advantages like cost-efficiency, enhanced binding affinity, and new derived functional motifs. Thirdly, the developed aptamer-based biosensors (aptasensors) for pesticide detection were systematically reviewed according to the different signal output modes. Finally, the challenges and future perspectives of pesticide detection are discussed comprehensively.

Efficient Screening of Pesticide Diazinon-Binding Aptamers Using the Sol-Gel-Coated Nanoporous Membrane-Assisted SELEX Process and Next-Generation Sequencing

Aptamer-based methods for detecting pesticides are more efficient than antibody-based methods by high thermal stability, low molecular weight, easy modification, and low cost. In this study, the systematic evolution of ligands by exponential enrichment (SELEX) process, combined with next-generation sequencing (NGS), was performed to select aptamers specific to the pesticide, diazinon, which was fixed on a sol-gel-coated nanoporous-anodized aluminum oxide membrane to overcome the immobilization effect of general method and simplify the elution step. The frequency of specific nucleotide sequences obtained after SELEX rounds was directly analyzed using NGS to eliminate the time-consuming cloning process used in the general SELEX methods. Nine sequences with the highest frequency after SELEX round 10 followed by NGS were selected and tested to derive their binding affinity with the target, diazinon, through circular dichroism (CD) spectrophotometry. The CD signal difference of the aptamer candidates ranged from 0.13 to 2.242 mdeg between diazinon-only treated and diazinon-aptamer-treated samples at a wavelength near 270 nm. Aptamer D-4, which had the highest binding affinity from CD spectrophotometry analysis, showed no cross-reactivity with non-target pesticides, such as baycarb, bifenthrin, and pyridaben, but interacted with the other pesticides, fipronil and 2-phenylphenol. Therefore, an aptamer was effectively screened by selection of high-frequency candidates after SELEX-NGS followed by CD analysis with the highest difference signal. A follow-up study is needed to confirm whether the proposed SELEX process combined with NGS for the discovery of aptamers for new targets can further shorten the SELEX cycle by reducing the number of SELEX rounds to 10 or less.