Agriculture antibody applications

Deshpande, S. S. Sharma, . P. Diagnostics. Immunoassays, nucleic acid probes, and biosensors — two decades of development, current status, and future projections in clinical, environmental, and agricultural applications, Diagnostics in the year 2000. Antibody, Biosensor, and Nucleic Acid Technologies , Eds. Singh, P. Sharma, . P. Tyle, P. Van Nostrand Reinhold New York, 1993, pp. 459-525. 

The exquisite dereplication ability of the mammalian immune systems to identify and remove unwanted xenobiotics has been utilized by some natural products chemists. Application of antibody-based detection methods for natural products have thus far been limited to those natural products that are of significant economic interest, either as agricultural contaminants or as potential pharmaceutical constituents. However, the development of more readily available microbially derived antibody fragments (58) and the advent of various methods for increasing their affinity (59) augur well for more widespread use of these technologies for dereplication in the future. Of the numerous reports of the use of this technique of antibody-based detection to identify natural products and related family members, two representative examples follow. 

Monoclonal antibody technology has really rather limited application in agriculture. In general, the uses found for Mabs have been confined to employment in diagnostic tests for various diseases and to a more limited extent in passive immunotherapy. 

New diagnostic tests have been developed based on monoclonal and polyclonal antibody technology and have become commercially available in the last two to three years for a wide range of applications in agriculture. Economical, rapid, sensitive and easy to use, these diagnostic tests are making an impact on three major analytical areas, namely ... 

The barcodes have been primarily used to assure brand and authenticity in pharmaceuticals, but applications could be forthcoming in tracing food batches. Combined with pathogen sensors, the barcodes that must be read by modified microscopes could trace sources of outbreak. There are antibacterial surfaces for the machines involved in food processing or production. With the conventional methods of detection it takes hours to days. With molecular electronic based methods, biosensors, e-nose, microarrays, nanobiosensors (based on microfluidic, nanomaterials, DNA, etc.) it takes seconds to minutes. A biosensor developed by an Agricultural Research Service scientist, Athens, uses fluorescent dye particles attached to bacteria antibodies. If Salmonella bacteria are present in the food being tested, the nanoculturing results with these two examples of instantaneous sensors, sized dye particles become visible. No need to send out to the lab and wait days for results. 

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