Sensitive competitive immunoassay of multiple mycotoxins with non-fouling antigen microarray

Various mycotoxins with strong carcinogenesis and toxicity are fatal threats in food safety, and require highly sensitive and high-throughput detections greatly. Herein a fluorescent competitive immunoassay microarray based on a non-fouling polymer brush, poly[(ethylene glycol) methacrylate-co-glycidyl methacrylate] (POEGMA-co-GMA) is explored to sensitively detect multiple mycotoxins with aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), ochratoxin A (OTA) and zearalenone (ZEN) as template targets. Due to uniformly large protein loading and high resistance to nonspecific protein absorption of the POEGMA-co-GMA brush, the optimal microarray exhibits wide dynamic ranges of three orders of magnitudes and low detection limits of 4, 4 and 3 pg mL−1, respectively, which is much better than that obtained with an epoxy-functionalized antigen microarray, and is comparable or even better than the conventional ELISA method. This work offers a powerful high-throughput tool to fast screening of toxins in food quality and environmental monitoring.