Ailiang Chen

Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences | CAAS · Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology for Agricultural Products

Most microfluidic-based "sample-in-result-out" systems suffer sophisticated microfluidic production processes, high-cost chips, and expensive instruments. They cannot be used in the meat market as well as farmer's markets in rural areas. Here, we developed a hand-held microfluidic chip system for on-site meat species qualitative authentication dete...

Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) is a thermostatic nucleic acid amplification technology that is widely used in the fields of clinical diagnosis and food safety detection. Centrifugal microfluidic chips are developed based on traditional microfluidic chips, using centrifugal force to achieve liquid flowing, mixing and reaction, elimina...

Foodborne poisoning caused by the cyclopeptide toxins-producing mushroom species seriously endangers human life health. In recent years discovery of new cyclopeptides is getting more attention not only for their toxicity but also for their specific bioactivity. In this study, a combined strategy using liquid chromatography tandem high resolution ma...

In the present study, real-time fluorescence loop–mediated isothermal amplification (flo-LAMP) and visual colorimetric (vis-LAMP) assays were established for Diodon identification. LAMP primers were designed for the Diodon cytochrome oxidase I gene, and their high specificity was validated against 21 other fish species. LAMP has a minimum detection...

Escolar or oilfish being sold as cod is a worldwide concerning food counterfeiting issue. This study established a simple and rapid real-time recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) assay for oilfish (Ruvettus pretiosus) and escolar (Lepidocybium flavobrunneum) detection. The assay uses RPA primers and a probe designed for the intraspecific cons...

The main insect sources of Chinese honey are Apis cerana and Apis mellifera. A. cerana honey has a higher nutritional value; therefore, its price is invariably several times higher than that of A. mellifera honey. Driven by economic interests, low-priced A. mellifera honey is often misrepresented as the more valuable A. cerana honey. In this study,...

Lepiota brunneoincarnata-induced mushroom poisoning has occurred widely in some areas of the world in recent years, resulting in high mortality and posing potential health risks to humans and pets. However, a rapid and sensitive method for the identification of L. brunneoincarnata is scarce. Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) combined wi...

MicroRNAs (miRNA) are a kind of endogenous non-coding small molecule RNA, which are widely found in plants, animals, and viruses. miRNA can regulate the post-transcriptional cleavage of target message RNA or inhibit its translation process, and plays an important regulatory role in gene expression. Further studies have shown that miRNAs also play a...

The pufferfish-poisoning epidemic is caused due to many consumers blindly tasting fish of an unknown species or adulterating food ingredients. Arothron is a pufferfish containing tetrodotoxin and saxitoxin in their bodies. Poisoning incidents of caused by Arothron occur occasionally. The purpose of the current study was to develop a simple identifi...

Merchants used frozen chicken to pass it off as chilled chicken, resulting in Economically Motivated Adulteration incidents. Here in this work, firstly, we established OPLS-DA and OPLS-R models based on metabolomics to obtain differential metabolites in chilled and frozen chicken (with different storage times), the PLS-DA model based on above diffe...

With the globalization of the food market and the convenience of food transportation between countries, consumers are increasingly worried about the source and safety of the food they eat. Traceability has been identified as an important tool for ensuring food safety and quality. This review mainly introduces the principles of five food traceabilit...

With widespread use of antibiotics in the aquaculture industry, bacterial resistance has recently attracted increasing attention. Continuous emergence of multi-resistant bacteria has greatly threatened human and animal health, as well as the quality and safety of livestock products. To control bacterial resistance, the effect of bacterial resistanc...

Russula senecis, a common poisonous mushroom, is widely distributed in China. Mushroom poisoning is becoming a major threat to human health and its rate is increasing worldwide. For the first time, we developed a set of loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assays based on a real-time fluorescence and a visualization method to detect R. sen...

Health concerns and financial losses caused by mushroom poisoning have been reported worldwide. Amanita citrinoannulata, a poisonous mushroom commonly found in China, results in a toxic reaction in humans after mistaken ingestion. To reduce the mistaken ingestion of poisonous mushrooms and to improve clinical diagnosis of mushroom poisoning, a rapi...

Some Takifugu species are commonly found in the coastal areas of China, Japan, Thailand, and Korea and cause pufferfish poisoning, which is toxic and even lethal to humans. From 2010 to 2015, there were 430 cases of pufferfish poisoning worldwide, resulting in 52 deaths. Identification of Takifugu species is imperative to reduce financial losses an...

Rapid and correct detection methods to identify Salmon fish species and adulteration is an crucial way to control fraud behavior in the fish market. To identify the three major Salmon fish species including Salmo salar and its usual adulteration species Oncorhynchus mykiss and Oncorhynchus keta, this study mainly applied a quick, operation simple,...

Mushroom poisoning is becoming a serious food safety and public health issue due to its high morbidity and mortality in some parts of the world. Identifying mushroom toxins at an early stage of suspected intoxication is crucial for therapeutic decision making. Ibotenic acid, muscimol, 2-amino-4,5-hexadienoic acid and 2-amino-4-pentynoic acid are a...

Globally, mushroom poisoning is becoming one of the most serious food safety-related problems. To investigate the source of mushroom poisoning, a rapid method for identifying toxic mushrooms is urgently required. This study aimed to establish a colorimetric method based on loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) for rapid detection of Amanita...

Establishing rapid and correct detection methods to identify cod fish species is very important to promote labels correction and control fraud behavior. This study developed a systematic method mainly using visible loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) to identify cod and oil fish that are commonly found from the Chinese market. Specific pr...

The comparison of DART-QTOF and LC-ESI-QTOF was studied on the discrimination of beef from different origins based on lipidomics. Compared to LC-ESI-QTOF (+), DART-QTOF (+) is particularly suitable for smaller compounds analysis, and has better repeatability and stability. The data were screened based on detection rate, RSD value, fold change and P...

Mushroom poisoning is responsible for nearly 50% of all oral poisoning-related deaths in China. Most mushroom poisoning incidences are caused by the difficulty in distinguishing whether wild mushrooms are poisonous or not. In this study, we aimed to develop two rapid and sensitive methods for Hebeloma crustuliniforme identification using visual and...

Recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) was combined with lateral flow to develop a gold nanoparticles test strip for point-of-care diagnosis of African swine fever virus (ASFV), which is called lateral flow gene assay (LFGA). Common diagnostic techniques, including polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and immunochromatography, are time-consuming and...

Traceability of milk origin in China is conducive to the implementation of the protection of regional products. In order to distinguish milk from different geographical distances in China, we traced the milk of eight farms in four neighboring provinces of China (Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Hebei, Ningxia Hui autonomous and Shaanxi), and multi...

17β-estradiol (E2) residues could enrich in organisms via food chain and lead to harmful biological effects for human body. To ascertain the binding domain of original E2 aptamer (E00) with long-sequence (76-mer), we developed novel truncated aptamers from E00, through rationally designed truncation by intercepting a single ring or a combination of...

Chlorophyllum molybdites is a kind of common poisonous mushroom in China that is widely distributed in different areas. Food poisoning caused by accidentally eating C. molybdites has become more frequent in recent years. In 2019, there were 55 food poisoning incidents caused by eating this mushroom in China. Mushroom poisoning continues to be a com...

Adulteration of food ingredients, particularly replacement of high-value milk with low-cost milk, affects food safety. For rapid and accurate identification of the possible adulterating milk species in an unknown sample, a centrifugal microfluidic chip-based real-time fluorescent multiplex loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) assay was dev...

Animal-origin food has been suggested as the main dietary source of perfluorinated alkylated substances (PFASs) for humans, and pork liver is a major contributor. The nationwide survey data of PFASs from pork liver in China was limited. This study determined 17 PFASs in pork liver samples from 30 regions including different provinces, autonomous re...

Caused by Salmonella pullorum, pullorosis is a bacterial disease threatening the poultry industry and has been listed as the bacterial disease to be eliminated by the government. However, antibiotic treatment of pullorosis has become increasingly difficult, resulting in severe influences on the sustainable development of poultry. Abuse of antibioti...

Mitochondrial genes were generally adopted for PCR-based meat adulteration authentication due to their excellent specificity to species and numerous copies in one cell. However, the number of mitochondrial gene copies varies according to cells and tissues, which leads to quantification errors for meat adulteration. To address this problem, single-c...

Donkey hide gelatin (Colla corii asini) is well-known for its high nutritional value, especially for medicinal purposes. However, it is also a potential candidate for adulteration because of its low yield and high price. To quantitatively detect adulterated donkey hide gelatin with all possible mixed animal species, a real-time PCR approach on the...

BACKGROUND Compared with the traditional qualitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR), which only identifies the category of species, the quantitative PCR method provides a value, which is very important for appropriate penalty enforcement according to the extent of adulteration. However, most of the current quantitative PCR methods are based on mit...

Rationale The use of multi‐isotopic analyses to trace beef is gaining wider acceptance, but there is still no uniform standard pretreatment method for stable isotope ratio determinations. Drying and defatting of meat samples are usually applied. Thus, a rapid sample preparation prrocedure is needed to provide a reference for the study of beef by st...

A low-cost novel lateral flow nucleic acid assay (LFNAA) was developed for rapid and sensitive authentication of yak milk on-site. In this method, a special abasic spacer C3 and tail nucleotide sequence modified reverse primers were innovatively designed for rapid isothermal recombinant polymerase amplification (RPA) to obtain a double-stranded amp...

The purpose of this study was to verify that the organic status of pork purchased in the markets from four different regions of China can be authenticated by the combined analysis of stable isotopes and multiple elements. Four stable isotope ratios (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ²H and δ¹⁸O) and the concentrations of seven elements (K, Na, Mg, Ca, Fe, Cu and Se) we...

Type-B aflatoxins (AFB1 and AFB2) frequently contaminate food, especially nuts and fried figs, and seriously threaten human health; hence, it is necessary for the newly rapid and sensitive detection methods to prevent the consumption of potentially contaminated food. Here, a lateral flow aptasensor for the detection of type-B aflatoxins was develop...

Multivariate stable isotope analysis combined with chemometrics was used to investigate and discriminate rice samples from six rice producing provinces in China (Heilongjiang, Jilin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan and Guizhou) and four other Asian rice producing countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, and Pakistan). The stable isotope characteristics...

Cow milk samples from various provinces in China were collected, and the effects of lactation stage, sampling time, and geographic origin on the samples were studied by elemental analysis-isotope ratio mass spectrometry (EA-IRMS). Traceability accuracy was determined using δ13C, δ15N, δ2H and δ18O values to specifically assign geographic origin. St...

Adulteration of goat meat with cheaper meat such as pork has been frequently found. Conventional PCR methods to distinguish goat meat from adulteration are qualitative, which easily produce false‐positive results due to contamination but not adulteration. To address this problem, real‐time PCR based on single‐copy housekeeping genes encoding replic...

An untargeted metabolomic method based on UPLC-QTOF were used to investigate the differences in coffee brewed by boiled, pour-over and cold-brew methods here. Distinctive separation among the three groups could be seen from principal component analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis. Analysis of variance, fold change and orthogonal projection...

Shish kebabs and mutton slices are two of the most favorite foods in China, which are often adulterated with low-cost animal meat such as chicken or duck meat. Currently, many methods have been applied to mutton adulteration detection. However, existing methods based on protein or polymerase chain reaction (PCR) are time-consuming and tedious, maki...

Rationale Isotope reference materials are essential to enable reliable and comparable isotope data across multiple laboratories. Although many reference materials already exist, the best reference materials should mimic the unknown samples, so new reference materials continue to evolve with the development of isotope research in new product areas....

Economically motivated adulteration (EMA) has become one of the most concerned food safety issues. However, existing mainstream PCR methods could neither achieve qualitative detection purposes, nor detect all possible meat species involved in adulteration. When meat has been adulterated with unidentified species but the result indicates no adultera...

A competitive fluorescent aptasensor was constructed based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) for determination of 17β-estradiol (E2). Initially, carboxyfluorescein (FAM)-labeled E2 aptamer and its partially complementary DNA modified with Black Hole Quencher 1 (BHQ1) formed aptamer/DNA duplexes and triggered fluorescence quenching. W...

Label-free Hg²⁺ aptamer was used as a sensing element and the PicoGreen dye was specific to ultra-sensitive double-stranded DNA (dsDNA), which achieved novel fluorescence assay for detection of both mercury and silver ions. In this aptasensor, Hg²⁺ bound to thymidine (T) to form T–Hg²⁺⁻T base pairs and Ag⁺ specifically interacted with C–C mismatche...

Rationale The retrospectivity (the ability to retrospect to a previously unknown compound in raw data) is very meaningful for food safety and risk assessment when facing new emerging drugs. Accurate mass and retention time based screening may lead false positive and false negative results so new retrospective, reliable platform is desirable. Metho...

Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is just a single base change in a DNA sequence, including transition, transversion, insertion or deletion of one base, and it is usual with an alternative of two possible nucleotides at a given position. It is also considered as the least frequent mutation in the biological genome, with the frequency of 1% or gr...

Ochratoxin A (OTA) is a mycotoxin identified as a contaminant in grains and wine throughout the world, and convenient, rapid and sensitive detection methods for OTA have been a long-felt need for food safety monitoring. Herein, we presented a new competitive format based lateral flow strip fluorescent aptasensor for one-step determination of OTA in...

Meat traceability based on molecular markers is exerting a great influence on food safety and will enhance its key role in the future. This study aimed to investigate and verify the polymorphism of 23 microsatellite markers and select the most suitable markers for individual identification and meat traceability of six swine breeds in the Chinese ma...

Three anthocyanins were isolated from strawberry extract by high-speed counter-current chromatography, using a biphasic mixture of tert-butyl methyl ether, n-butanol, acetonitrile, water and trifluoroacetic acid (2.5:2.0:2.5:5.0:1.0%). The anthocyanins were identified as pelargonidin-3-rutinoside, cyanidin-3-glucoside and pelargonidin-3-glucoside w...

Genetic traceability in the whole food supply chain is a reliable method to protect the integrity of Halal beef, but there is no available SNPs panel for the meat traceability of cattle breeds in China. This study aimed at developing a useful SNP panel for Halal beef traceability in the Chinese market. Fifty-nine SNPs markers belonging to 29 autoso...

The authors describe an ultra-sensitive approach for the determination of lead(II) by using a lead-specific aptamer and a fluorophore derived from perylenetetracarboxylic acid diimide (PTCDI). The fluorescence of PTCDI, with excitation/emission peaks at 494/543 nm, is quenched by the aptamer but restored if the aptamer binds lead(II). A detection s...

The authors describe an aptamer based assay for determination of ractopamine (RAC) by using PicoGreen (PG) as a fluorescent probe specific for dsDNA. In the absence of RAC, the aptamer forms a duplex structure with a complementary sequence that results in enhanced PG fluorescence. Upon binding to RAC, the aptamer undergoes a structural switch. This...

It is known that gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) possess peroxidase-like activity. They can catalyze the oxidation of 3,3,5,5-tetramethylbenzidine by H2O2 which leads to a color change from red to blue. It is shown here that the peroxidase-like activity of AuNPs can be inhibited by passivating its surface passivation with a ssDNA aptamer against sulfadi...

Lead (Pb) is a heavy metal that does great harm to human bodies through its accumulation in the food chain. It remains a challenge to use environment-friendly and biocompatible materials to sensitively detect lead in organisms and aquatic ecosystems. To achieve highly sensitive and selective Pb²⁺ detection, a sensor based on ultra-sensitive double-...

In order to develop an aptamer based fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) assay for 19-nortestosterone, a 76-mer 17β-estradiol aptamer was split into two pieces (referred to as P1 and P2, respectively). P1 was labeled with a quencher (BHQ), and P2 with a fluorophore (6FAM). The two aptamer pieces were employed to detect NT via FRET quenchi...

In this paper, citrate-stabilized gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) were used to develop a method for rapidly and visually detecting cyromazine in river water. AuNPs could strongly interact with cyromazine, which causes an apparent color change observable by the naked eye, and their absorbance spectra could be measured by UV-vis spectroscopy. The citrate...

Most aptasensors are designed based on aptamers' conformational change or structural transformation upon interaction with their targets. A limitation of these strategies is the unpredictability of such structural alterations that may yield false-positive or nonspecific signals. In bioanalysis, a dominant strategy for protein determination is the sa...

Aptamer-based strip assay is an easy, highly efficient and low-cost detection method, which has been developed and easily applied to onsite detection. A new sensitive sandwich dipstick assay for adenosine triphosphate (ATP) detection was successfully developed based on specific recognition between split aptamer fragments and the target. In this met...

National and industrial standards used for the certification and inspection of eggs and egg products in the People's Republic of China were reviewed. Although egg production is very high, specific egg and egg product standards are insufficient. Currently, 11 recommended standards and 6 compulsory standards are used to inspect eggs and egg products....