Mabhude, Yandiswa2024-11-042024-11-042024https://hdl.handle.net/10566/17102Food and water are two of the necessities required for survival. With increasing global population, urbanization, and climate change, to name a few, the strain on these two precious resources puts pressure on health as well as the economic sector. Microbial contamination of food and water can lead to lethal infections that are detrimental to human health. More than 90% of reported food-borne illnesses were caused by bacterial species such as Staphylococcus, Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, Bacillus etc. In the last decade, Salmonella was the leading cause of bacterial food-borne illnesses; followed by Campylobacter and Listeria. Listeriosis cases were reported in 2017 in Gauteng province, and the number of infected persons rapidly escalated nationwide prompting an investigation wherein a total of 937 cases were identified. Early detection of pathogens in food and water could prevent or slow down the spread of infections and deaths caused by consuming contaminated food and water. The laboratory and on-site approaches that are currently used for quality control technologies are precise and sensitive, but they have drawbacks such as being laborious and time-consuming. Therefore, there is an urgent need for approaches that may be utilized to detect microbial contaminations at a point-of-care (PoC), that are user-friendly, quick, robust, and sensitive. The use of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs)-based lateral flow assay (LFA) for the detection of these pathogens is gaining traction among researchers as an alternative to conventional methods for on-site testing in places where there is no proper infrastructure, particularly low-resourced areas. The current study aimed to develop an aptamer-AuNPs-based LFA for the detection of food and water pathogens at PoC.enAptamersFood-borne pathogensWater-borne pathogensGold nanoparticlesLateral flow assaysThesis