Novel Strategies To Enhance Lateral Flow Immunoassay Sensitivity for Detecting Foodborne Pathogens

Abstract

Food contaminated by foodborne pathogens causes diseases, affects individuals, and even kills those affected individuals. As such, rapid and sensitive detection methods should be developed to screen pathogens in food. One current detection method is lateral flow immunoassay, an efficient technique because of several advantages, including rapidity, simplicity, stability, portability, and sensitivity. This review presents the format and principle of lateral flow immunoassay strip and the development of conventional lateral flow immunoassay for detecting foodborne pathogens. Furthermore, novel strategies that can be applied to enhance the sensitivity of lateral flow immunoassay to detect foodborne pathogens are presented; these strategies include innovating new label application, designing new formats of lateral flow immunoassay, combining with other methods, and developing signal amplification systems. With these advancements, detection sensitivity and detection time can be greatly improved.

Current and Emerging Technologies for Rapid Detection of Pathogens

“…The frequent outbreak of foodborne diseases and the economic and social implications indicate that analytical methodologies that can rapidly detect and identify pathogens are urgently needed. As such, many researchers devote themselves to developing more advanced detection methods that can identify pathogens accurately and rapidly in a timely manner in the food industry [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…After the sample is applied to the sample pad, it migrates along the test strip via capillary action, and a signal response is obtained about 5-10 min later [39,40]. Due to its simplicity, rapidity, low cost, portability, and facile interpretation without external reagent or external instrumentation, LFIA has held great potential for foodborne pathogen detection [15,16,41]. In addition, the LFIA can realize visual detection and quantitative detection by employing different labels, such as colloid gold, fluorescent materials, and magnetic beads [40,42,43].…”

Enzyme-triggered tyramine-enzyme repeats on prussian blue-gold hybrid nanostructures for highly sensitive electrochemical immunoassay of tissue polypeptide antigen

“…Immunological methods have become the dominant test techniques for clinical quantitative detection of biomarkers because of the high-specificity molecular recognition of antigenic epitopes by antibodies Crivianu-Gaita and Thompson, 2015;Miao et al, 2015). Despite some advances in the clinical diagnostics, e.g., radioimmunoassay (RIA) and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), they have some limitations including the short shelf life of 125 I-labeled antibody, radiation hazards, and a relatively long assay time (Zielen et al, 2015;Shan et al, 2015). To keep pace with expectations in future point-of-care testing, there is the request for more flexible, yet highly sensitive, quantitative, and easy-to-use methods.…”

Lateral Flow Immunoassay for Rapid Diagnosis of Potato Blackleg Caused by Pectobacterium atrosepticum

“…To be suitable for widespread monitoring of potato diseases in the field without special equipment or skills, diagnostics need to be simple, reliable, highly specific and sensitive. The lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA), also called the immunochromatographic assay, complies with all these requirements 6,9,10 . The application of antibodies makes LFIA sensitive and specific, while the lateral flow principle allows rapid analysis under out-oflaboratory conditions.…”

“…Currently, the list of agricultural bacteria detected by commercially available LFIA systems is small. Similarly, developments described in the literature are limited 6,10,[14][15][16] . Therefore, considering the number of serious bacterial infections known to affect crops and the associated losses 17,18 , the development of LFIA tests for bacterial phytopathogens is a high priority.…”