Monitoring and detection of antibiotic residues in animal derived foods: Solutions using aptamers

Food safety has long been one of the greatest problems in public health. Among all the food safety problems, antibiotic residues in animal derived foods are one of the most serious food contaminations that threaten human health seriously. However, the conventional techniques for monitoring and detection of antibiotics have shortcomings such as complicated sample pretreatment procedures, complex and time-consuming operations, dependence on expensive and bulky instruments, need for skilled professional personnel as well as poor selectivity and sensitivity, thus limiting their applications. The emergence of aptamers provides a new novel probe for the establishment of aptasensors to circumvent those drawbacks because of their outstanding superiorities. Thus, the application of aptamers for monitoring and detection of antibiotic residues has attracted increasing attention and has become one of the research hotspots in the past years, showing a great potential for practical transformation and commercialization. In this review, the recent progresses of aptamer selection against various antibiotics were first presented. Then, the design and fabrication of various nanomaterials based aptasensors for monitoring and detection of antibiotic residues in animal derived foods were systematically summarized, with anticipation to avoid repeated work on aptamer selection and provide new insight and point out the future direction into the development of aptasensors for antibiotic detection.