Microcantilever resonator arrays for immunodetection of beta-lactoglobulin milk allergen

The incidence of allergic disease is globally increasing so much that food allergy is actually consideredas one of the main diseases of civilization, as well as among the major costs for healthcare worldwide. Insuch a scenario, the recent legislations introduced from European Union to protect consumers drasticallydrive the need for rapid, sensitive, and robust techniques to detect allergens within foodstuffs.We here report on an innovative immunorecognition method for -lactoglobulin milk allergen detec-tion, based on microcantilever resonator arrays, a promising class of biosensors. An original sandwichassay that uses the same polyclonal antibody as capture and secondary immunorecognition agent wasproposed to overcome the low affinity of the simple direct method. The developed immunoassay showedbetter Limit Of Detection (LOD) and Limit Of Quantification (LOQ) than commercial ELISA plates, evenafter an aging of four months. To our knowledge, this work represents the first example in the literatureof successfully immunodetection of milk allergens in low concentrations by microcantilever resonatorarrays, thus opening new perspectives on alternative diagnostic tools for milk allergens screening tests