Abstract:

Although it is difficult to immunize animals with antibiotics as half-antigens for antibody generation, immunoassay techniques have become the most popular methods for detecting antibiotics in foods and environment, such as commercially available chloramphenicol and neomycin test kits. Nevertheless, actual applications of immunoassay techniques are limited due to the wide variety of antibiotics, high cost of preparing antibodies against some antibiotics, difficulties in large-scale screening of samples and low sensitivity of these techniques. Aptamers, also named chemical antibody, are single stranded DNA or RNA ligands, which can be bound to different targets from a huge library of molecules containing randomly created sequences with high specificity and affinity. Aptamers have some advantages over conventional immune antibodies, such as easy in vitro selection by their target molecules, the possibility of chemical synthesis and modification and high stability. This paper describes the finding history of aptamers, methods for selecting them, their characteristics and techniques established based on them for the detection of antibiotics and other small molecules. Furthermore, application perspectives of the aptamers based detection techniques are proposed.

Key words: aptamers, antibiotics, sensors, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, aptazyme