Aptasensors for Pesticide Detection

Pesticides are one of the prominent issues in food safety and environmental pollution, and a rapid pesticide residue detection method is urgently needed to keep humans from being affected. Aptamers are single stranded DNA- and RNA- based oligonucleotides that can bind to their targets with high affinity and specificity, and have tremendous applications as therapeutic and diagnostic agent. The properties of conformational changes upon target-analyte binding make them most appropriate and suitable candidate to design label free and portable bio-devices for analytical applications. Purpose of Review:Although aptamer applications are dominated by clinical or medical diagnostics, initial steps have been taken for the application of aptamers to ensure food safety. In this review, we discuss the role of aptamers in the detection of pesticides whose presence in foods pose serious threat to human health. © 2018, Korean Society of Environmental Risk Assessment and Health Science and Springer Nature B.V.