Challenges and future perspectives of aptamers for food applications

The detection of related hazardous substances in foods is essential to the supervision of food safety and food quality. Aptamer is a single-strand DNA or RNA oligonucleotide, which has the advantages of good stability, high specificity and affinity, easy modification, and nonimmunogenicity. In this chapter, we will introduce conclusively the main detection mechanisms, summarize the current challenges, and outline the prospects of aptamer-based approaches to food applications, such as improving detection performance (sensitivity, stability, accuracy, efficiency), the CRISPR-Cas system, in-field detection, and screening aptamers with higher affinity and specificity, etc., which can offer guidance for developing assays for food integrity.