Project description
Synthetic antibodies to detect harmful toxins in food samples
Toxins produced by microbes can lead to foodborne illnesses, underscoring the importance of prioritising food safety. Food processing and preparation techniques are unable to completely eliminate these toxins, which are often imperceptible in routine analyses. Toxins such as beauvericin (BEA), enniatin B (ENN B), and cereulide (CER) can contaminate food. Detecting and eliminating them is crucial. The production of antibodies against CER, BEA, or ENN B through traditional animal immunisation methods is unfeasible, thus hindering cost-effective and dependable detection system for these toxins in food products. However, the EU-funded SynAb4Toxin project aims to use synthetic antibodies (SynAbs) to develop technologies capable of detecting and isolating these toxins in complex food samples.
Objective
Food safety plays a critical role in society. When it comes to avoiding food poisoning, most of the attention goes to preventing microbial growth in food products. However, the cause of intoxication is the presence of toxins produced by these microorganisms. Yet, standard industrial or household food processing and preparation techniques effective at removing the producing microorganisms fail to remove the actual toxins. As a result, these toxins, which typically are not detected in routine microbial food analysis, are consumed daily by the general population.
Beauvericin (BEA) and enniatin B (ENN B) are mycotoxins produced on crops that can easily end up in the final food or feed products. Other examples include cereulide (CER), which is produced by bacteria and has a high prevalence in ready-to-eat foods. Multiple consequences and even fatalities have been reported due to the consumption of food contaminated with BEA/ENN or CER and as such, the detection and sequestration of these toxins is of utmost importance, both in public health and economic terms, as well as from a broader stakeholder perspective.
Despite numerous attempts worldwide, the current state of the art does not allow the production of antibodies against CER, BEA or ENN B via classical animal immunization. This hampers the creation of a fast, robust, inexpensive and on-field (kit-based) detection system for these toxins in food commodities. In the current project, I intend to use artificial synthetic antibodies (SynAbs) that bind to these toxins (ionophoric cyclic depsipeptides) to produce valuable technologies for detecting and isolating these toxins in complex food samples.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunisation
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagriculture
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Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
9000 Gent
Belgium