Assistant Professor of the Microbial Biotechnology Department of ABRII, Dr. Maryam Mousivand, gave a lecture at the 3^rd GSEBB2023 held on October 23, 2023. She presented her lecture on “In silico aptamer engineering; an affordable approach for small molecule aptasensor development”.

She stated that because of the practical advantages of aptamer technology over analogous antibody, they have the potential to serve as effective recognition elements for small molecule biosensor development. Despite this potential, the drastic size difference between the small molecules and aptamers is a main challenge to screen high functional aptamers through conventional SELEX procedures as a gold-standard methodology for aptamer development. To overcome the challenges, experimental findings can be combined to in silico approaches to refine the affinity and specificity of small molecule targets binding aptamers. In the last decade, different strategies including genetic algorithm based in silico maturation, evolutionary mimicking algorithm, truncating, joining of binding motifs, etc. have been successfully applied to design new aptameric probes. Due to the cost and time constraints, the experimental evaluation of the all candidate aptamers can be considered as the main bottlenecks for their research and commercialization. Reliable computational simulations can virtually screen a large database of aptamers to identify those with the highest binding affinity to a desired small molecule in cost and time-effective ways. Aptamer engineering through in silico sequence or scaffold refinement can be considered as a new and promising research field for novel small-binding aptamer discovery. Low-cost integration of the newly designed probes as recognition elements in existing aptasensing platforms allows the designing of various novel aptasensors for small molecule target monitoring.