Application of gold-labeled antibody biosensor in simultaneous determination of total aflatoxins using artificial neural network

Preparation of antibody-coated gold nanoparticles (GNPs) specific to aflatoxins B1, B2, G1 and G2 and its use in developing aflatoxins diagnostic method were presented in this paper. The formation of gold-labeled antibodies was accomplished at optimal condition. Due to severe overlapping between the emission profiles for the aflatoxins, they cannot be determined by direct inspection of data. The strategy used in this study, constituted by artificial neural network (ANN), was easy to implement and to originate reliable results. ANN can be successfully applied to spectrofluorimetric spectra matrices to simultaneous determination of total aflatoxins. Quantitative results obtained using ANN method for aflatoxins in pistachio nuts samples were compared to those obtained using the HPLC method. Obtained results using these two methods did not show significant differences.