Aptamer-based electrochemical sensor for ochratoxin

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Food safety is of paramount importance to the flourishing agriculture sector of Canada. It is a matter of great practical importance to develop cost-effective, portable, detection- and quantitation-capable sensors for undesirable contaminants such as fungus-derived mycotoxins within important crops such as grapes, grown for the Canadian wine-making industry, and fresh fruits such as cherries, intended for export all over the world. To date, conventional means for detection of mycotoxins in agricultural crops frequently makes use of expensive, time-consuming, and cumbersome antibody-based technologies. This NSERC ENGAGE proposal sets forth a short-term, initiating, collaboration between the laboratory of Dr. Dipankar Sen, at Simon Fraser University, and the Summerland, BC-based company, Flex Alert, that specializes in developing technologies for use in intelligent monitoring of fruit growth and packaging. Flex Alert has a long-term interest in the sensitive detection of a variety of mycotoxins produced by fungal infections of food crops. The proposed collaborative project between the Sen group/SFU and Flex Alert will focus on the design, synthesis, biochemical and electrochemical testing of a prototype Deoxyribosensor (DORS) device capable of detecting the mycotoxin, Ochratoxin A (OTA) in solution extracts from food crops. This project represents a propitious coming together of the DORS technology, invented by Dr. Sen and patented by SFU, an OTA-detecting aptamer assigned to Flex Alert, and Flex Alert's own business goals for creating an efficient new device for mycotoxin monitoring. Successful completion of this project will spur a deeper collaboration between SFU and Flex Alert; furthermore, the development of new and marketable mycotoxin detection devices will benefit farmers in both British Columbia and Canada as a whole.