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.