Research

On December 4, DTU organized the workshop “Applying Aptamers to Food Safety Control”, with a talk by Dr Tran Thi Thanh Thoa, a DTU staff member doing postdoctoral research at Korea University. The workshop was chaired by Dr Nguyen Minh Hung, Director of the DTU Center for Molecular Biology, and attended by the members of the DTU Centers for Molecular Biology and for Advanced Chemistry.

 

  

 

Dr Tran Thi Thanh Thoa presented results of her aptamer research. Having started researching aptamers in 2012, Dr Tran Thi Thanh Thoa has acquired extensive experience working with world-leading aptamer experts and published several papers in famous scientific journals, such as in Scientific Report. Dr Tran Thi Thanh Thoa is currently working as a research professor at the Korea University Biosensors and Biotechnology lab, and she is engaged in research to apply aptamers to detect and quantify insecticides in food. Aptamers can bind selectively and with high affinity to toxins in food through the SELEX selection procedure, while aptamers can also bind to fluorescents and to nanoparticles. Through the signal change after contact with toxins, these toxic substances can be quantified.

 

 

“Producing aptamers is simpler, faster, and more efficient compared to other substances,” Dr Tran Thi Thanh Thao stressed in her talk. “In particular, aptamers are durable with physico-chemical agents, making them a new research direction requiring a lot of knowledge from basic biology to physical chemistry. In Vietnam only two research works have been published in ISI journals so far. With the research experience of their scientists and with their investments in up-to-date equipment, the DTU Centers for Molecular Biology and for Advanced Chemistry can perfectly join hands and create a kit for use in food safety control.”

 

With his experience in molecular biology and pathology research, Dr Nguyen Minh Hung suggests that, “Aptamer research is a new and very interesting line of research, but it requires gathering multidisciplinary knowledge. Cooperation between scientists from biology, physics, and chemistry will open many new research directions not only with scientific meaning but also leading to practically useful applications. Research into applying aptamers can find use in qualifying and quantifying toxins in food or drinking water, such as heavy metals and toxins from microorganisms; lead to medical applications such as detecting pathogenic microorganisms and detecting biological molecular markers; be used in measuring environmental indicators; and so on.”