Aptamer-based enrichment system and capillary chip for low-abundance water contaminant detection to ensure aquaculture safety and quality

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Aquaculture is the farming of fish, shellfish and aquatic plants in fresh or seawater and has been a rapidly growing economy output of $733 millions in Canada. Contaminants with pharmaceutical effects are seeping from the sewage into natural water systems, and marine toxins persist in surface water. These contaminants, despite their very low concentrations, are constantly ingested by fish and shellfish, altering their growth and thereby greatly affecting the yield of aquaculture. More importantly, marine toxins accumulate in aquaculture products and are ingested by consumers, causing serious food poisoning, organ damages and cancers. There is therefore a great need for highly sensitive, rapid and user-friendly field deployable monitoring tools for detection of trace amount of contaminants, to conduct water quality surveys, identify and assess source of point and non-point pollution, establish concentration limits and classify harvest areas based on the analysis.Microfluidic biosensors are becoming more powerful in automating and miniaturizing detection, but the concentration of low abundance environmental analytes requires large volumes that are not practical for chip-based devices. Concentration techniques to collect sufficient analytes, such as solid phase extraction and evaporation are time-consuming, labor-intensive, contamination-prone, often inefficient and not compatible with field use. We propose to develop a portable detection system combining an aptamer-based analyte enrichment mechanism, and a microfluidic chip for hands-off processing, integrated with a sensitive graphene-based sensor. The project will establish a novel analyte enrichment and detection technology that is capable of ultra-high sensitivity, reaching detection limit not achievable by current field deployable methods.