Abstract:
Zearalenone (ZEN) is a harmful and heavily-polluting mycotoxin in grains, causing significant grain loss. It is usually generated by
Fusarium and
Gibberella fungal species that can contaminate food and feed at all stages of production, harvesting, storage, and processing. A variety of existing analytical and detection technologies face technical bottlenecks such as low sensitivity and lack of intelligence, and they are difficult to realize early detection and early discovery of ZEN. To solve these problems, the antibody combined europium oxide latex microspheres probes were developed. Latex microspheres are nano labeled materials with abundant color, uniform size and large specific surface area, providing abundant sites for conjugated antibodies. The detection technology based on a latex microsphere antibody probe has excellent stability and high sensitivity. Europium(Eu)is an element with high quantum yield, narrow band width, long emission life and large volume. It is widely used in immunoassay due to large Stokes shift and low toxicity. Eu can effectively avoid the interference of background fluorescence, and the fluorescent oxide latex microspheres prepared by Eu have the advantages of bright color, uniform particle size and good monodispersity. These characteristics make the europium oxide latex microsphere antibody probe have the advantages of high repeatability, accuracy and sensitivity in ZEN rapid intelligent detection. In this work,a fluorescence quantitative intelligent point-of-care testing (POCT)method was developed for the detection of ZEN in wheat. Under optimized conditions, the linear range of this detection was 0.2-2.4 ng/mL, the minimum detection limit was 0.02 ng/mL, and the recovery rate was 104.9%-110.3%. The intra-batch repeatability and inter-batch reproducibility experiments showed a recovery rate of 95.2%-104.2% (CV=5.5%) and 92.3%-107.5% (CV=3.4%), respectively. In practical application, this study not only provided an accurate and sensitive method for intelligent detection of ZEN, but also showed great potential for monitoring mycotoxins and other hazard factors in food and feed.