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Nuts are a well-known cause of food allergy and, once this has been diagnosed, due to the likelihood of cross-sensitization to multiple tree nut allergens, their strict avoidance from the diet is advisable. In this context, we present electrochemical bioplatforms to detect traces of hazelnut and walnut in processed foods through the determination of their respective allergenic proteins Cor a 9 and Jug r 1 in a fast and sensitive assay. First, the evaluation of the single determination of both proteins was performed by building sandwich immunoconjugates on the surface of magnetic microbeads relying on specific antibodies unmodified or conjugated to horseradish peroxidase. Amperometric transduction was made upon trapping the magnetic bioconjugates on the surface of disposable carbon electrodes, using the hydroquinone/hydrogen peroxide system. The great analytical performance achieved with the individual platforms (detection limits of 0.12 and 0.56 ng mL−1 for Jug r 1 and Cor a 9, respectively), led us to the individual and dual quantification of both proteins in raw dough and baked cookies incurred with ground nuts. The developed method allowed detecting baked cookies incurred with 0.0025% ground walnut and 0.00002% ground hazelnut with results comparable to those provided by ELISA techniques. The feasibility of performing the dual determination of both allergens in a single run was demonstrated.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death worldwide. The five-year survival rate of CRC patients depends on the stage at diagnosis, being higher than 80% when CRC is diagnosed in the early stages but lower than 10% when CRC is diagnosed in advanced stages. Autoantibodies against specific CRC autoantigens (tumor-associated antigens (TAAs)) in the sera of patients have been widely demonstrated to aid in early diagnosis. Thus, we herein aim to identify autoantigens target of autoantibodies specific to CRC that possess a significant ability to discriminate between CRC patients and healthy individuals by means of liquid biopsy. To that end, we examined the protein content of the exosomes released by five CRC cell lines and tissue samples from CRC patients by means of immunoprecipitation coupled with mass spectrometry analysis. A total of 103 proteins were identified as potential autoantigens specific to CRC. After bioinformatics and meta-analysis, we selected 15 proteins that are more likely to be actual CRC autoantigens in order to evaluate their role in CRC prognosis by Western blot (WB) and immunohistochemistry (IHC). We found dysregulation at the protein level for 11 of these proteins in both tissue and plasma exosome samples from patients, along with an association of nine of these proteins with CRC prognosis. After validation, all but one showed a statistically significant high diagnostic ability to distinguish CRC patients and individuals with premalignant lesions from healthy individuals, either by luminescence Halotag-based beads, or by a multiplexed biosensing platform involving the use of magnetic microcarriers as solid support modified with covalently immobilized Halotag fusion proteins constructed for CRC detection. Taken together, our results highlight the usefulness of the approach defined here to identify the TAAs specific to chronic diseases; they also demonstrate that the measurement of autoantibody levels in plasma against the TAAs identified here could be integrated into a point-of-care (POC) device for CRC detection with high diagnostic ability.