Titre: Toxins and tremors: Aptamers for food safety and health applications    Hôte: Antonella Badia   Résumé: Aptamers are single-stranded, synthetic oligonucleotides that fold into 3-dimensional shapes capable of binding non-covalently with high affinity and specificity to a target molecule. The compatibility of short nucleic acids with nanomaterials and polymer matrices affords the opportunity to marry the molecular recognition abilities of aptamers with the advanced properties of the material, such as signaling ability or differential permeability. This presentation will discuss the bottlenecks in the discovery and characterization of aptamers and some strategies for overcoming these issues. Furthermore, two case studies will be presented. The first is on aptamers for a family of small molecule toxin and their application in low-cost biosensing for food safety. The second will examine aptamers for use in thecentral nervous system in animal models of schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.