Development of microarrays and biosensors for mycotoxins determination at ENEA

ENEA is an Italian national public research institution dealing basically with energy, new technologies and environment, organized in 11 research centres spread over the entire national territory operating mainly in support of Scientific Research Ministry’s programmes. The aim of this presentation is to report some activities carried out at Casaccia Research Center, Rome in biosensors field. Casaccia is the our main research Center, multidiciplinary campus, hosting scientists with expertise in many different fields encompassing physics, chemistry, information science, engineering and our research team is working in Laboratory "Agroindustrial Innovation” mainly on microsystems and biosensors development and application for food contaminants determination. In ENEA before to devote our attention on biosensors for MTXs (Mycotoxins) determination we developed potentiometric device for s-triazines and E.coli determination [1,2]. We also developed a microarray antibodies based for suitable for two MTXs (Aflatoxin B1 and Fumonisine) determination. Actually we focused our attention on mass sensitive biosensor, based on Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM). QCM based biosensors are popular for their sensitive mass detection capabilities and their ability to monitor in real-time. The general operating principle of a QCM biosensor is adecrease in the crystal’s resonance frequency following binding of the target organism. When a rigid mass binds to the oscillating crystal surface, the shift in the resonance frequency (f) is proportional to the mass bound following the Sauerbrey equation. Hence, the QCM can potentially be used to develop affinity biosensor in order to identify and quantity specific target molecules in a sample. During a collaboration with Prof.Tibor Hianik we explored this method for label-free detection of low molecular toxicant and developed a QCM [3] and impedimetric biosensor [4] for detection ochratoxin A using DNA aptamers as specific receptors with a limit of detection (LOD) of 0.12 nM . We decided to continued in the field of mass sensitive QCM biosensor development also in ENEA [5].