Aptamers: A Promising Tool for Ochratoxin A Detection in Food Analysis

The contamination of food and feed by mycotoxins has become an increasingly serious problem. Mycotoxins represent a major risk to human and animal health, as well as economics. Herein, we focus on Ochratoxin A (OTA), which is one of the most common mycotoxins contaminating feed and foodstuffs. OTA is a secondary metabolite produced by various Aspergillus and Penicillium strains. Upon ingestion, OTA has a number of acute and chronic toxic effects. It is nephrotoxic, teratogenic, immunosuppressive, and carcinogenic (group 2B). As a consequence, some regulatory limits have been introduced on the levels of OTA in several commodities. The toxic nature of OTA demands highly sensitive and selective monitoring techniques to protect human and animal health. As alternative to traditional analytical techniques, biochemical methods for OTA analysis have attained great interest in the last few decades. They are mainly based on the integration of antibodies or aptamers as biorecognition elements in sensing platforms. However, aptamers have gained more attention in affinity-based assays because of their high affinity, specificity, stability, and their easy chemical synthesis. In this brief review, we present an overview of aptamer-based assays and their applications in OTA purification and detection, appeared in the literature in the last five years.