Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors for detecting allergens in food

\u3cp\u3eFood allergy is a growing public health concern. Patients suffering from food allergies need to avoid the offending food in order to avoid getting an allergic response. There is a need for a quick, cheap and reliable point-of-care (POC) sensor for household use and for industry use. Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is an upcoming technique in the food allergen field. It has shown great potential for studying biomolecular interactions without extensive sample preparations such as the removal of excess reactants in sample solutions. Food sample preparation will be reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, this method is very sensitive and able to detect also trace amounts of food allergens.\u3c/p\u3

Residue-Specific Incorporation of Noncanonical Amino Acids for Protein Engineering

The incorporation of noncanonical amino acids has given protein chemists access to an expanded repertoire of amino acids. This methodology has significantly broadened the scope of protein engineering allowing introduction of amino acids with non-native functionalities, such as bioorthogonal reactive handles (azides and alkynes) and hydrophobic fluorinated side chains. Here, we describe the efficient residue-specific replacement of methionine by azidonorleucine in an engineered green fluorescent protein using a bacterial expression system to introduce a single reactive site for the strain-promoted azide-alkyne cycloaddition