Cyanotoxins are posing an increasing threat to the health of humans and wildlife. Cylindrospermopsin is a cyanotoxin that occurs in warm climates and is harmful when ingested. The toxic effects of CYN can affect multiple organ systems. The effects, coupled with the evidence of a mass contamination of a water supply in Australia, prove that CYN needs to be investigated further.
Aptamers have become a desirable method for detection of CYN as a result of an aptamer’s high specificity and the ability to scale up experiments. Aptamers have been designed to bind with a variety of targets, including cyanotoxins. An aptamer for CYN was identified by Elshafey et al.
This study aims to confirm the binding of the aptamer to CYN and the selectivity of the aptamer using fluorescent biosensing and circular dichroism. Aptamer affinity capture was used to investigate the possibility of a real world application of the aptamer.
