Background

Food safety is vital in everyday life. Food toxins are small peptides or proteins that can cause disease by disrupting biological macromolecules such as enzymes or cellular receptors. Toxins are introduced either externally or from internal, spoilage-related pathogens. To keep these unsafe foods off the market, detection techniques for various toxins have been devised. Although many techniques serve this purpose well, challenges remain regarding sensitivity, specificity, and cost, especially for trace amounts of highly lethal proteinaceous toxins.

Scope and approach

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is a widely used nanotechnology for imaging and force measurement in biophysics and biology. Its high sensitivity in probing specific, single-molecule binding between molecules is applicable to food toxin detection. In this review, after a summary of the development of AFM, different detection operation modes are introduced along with examples of their applications.

Key findings and conclusions

Cantilever sensing and recognition imaging are found to be the appropriate AFM techniques for detection. Their shared functionalization approaches are outlined for two categories of surfaces: silicon and gold. Recent progress in AFM biosensors and their applications to food toxin detection are discussed. Single-molecule sensitivity and ease of designing sensing schemes make these AFM techniques excellent candidates for real-world application. Existing challenges in designing sensing molecules and preventing the food matrix from confounding signals are not only applicable to AFM techniques but to most current biosensors. Through the collaboration among materials science, chemistry, and molecular biology, solving these issues will promote significant advancement in AFM-based food toxin detection.

中文翻译：

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使用原子力显微镜单分子检测食品中的蛋白质和毒素

背景

食品安全在日常生活中至关重要。食物毒素是小肽或蛋白质，可通过破坏生物大分子（例如酶或细胞受体）来引起疾病。毒素是从外部或内部与腐败相关的病原体引入的。为了将这些不安全的食品拒之门外，已经设计了各种毒素的检测技术。尽管许多技术很好地达到了此目的，但是在灵敏度，特异性和成本方面仍然存在挑战，尤其是对于痕量的高致死性蛋白质毒素而言。

范围和方法

原子力显微镜（AFM）是生物物理学和生物学中用于成像和力测量的广泛使用的纳米技术。它在探测分子之间特定的单分子结合方面具有很高的灵敏度，可用于食品毒素检测。在这篇综述中，在总结了原子力显微镜的发展之后，介绍了不同的检测操作模式及其应用实例。

主要发现和结论

发现悬臂传感和识别成像是用于检测的适当AFM技术。针对两类表面概述了它们共享的功能化方法：硅和金。讨论了AFM生物传感器的最新进展及其在食品毒素检测中的应用。单分子灵敏度和易于设计的传感方案使这些AFM技术成为实际应用的理想选择。设计感测分子和防止食物基质混淆信号方面的现有挑战不仅适用于AFM技术，而且适用于大多数当前的生物传感器。通过材料科学，化学和分子生物学之间的合作，解决这些问题将促进基于AFM的食品毒素检测的显着进步。