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Abstract Human carbonic anhydrase 1 (CA1) has been suggested as a biomarker for identification of several diseases including cancers, pancreatitis, diabetes and Sjogren's syndrome. However, the lack of a rapid, cheap, accurate and easy‐to‐use quantification technique has prevented widespread utilization of CA1 for practical clinical applications. To this end, we present a label‐free electronic biosensor for detection of CA1 utilizing highly sensitive graphene field effect transistors (G‐FETs) as a transducer and specific RNA aptamers as a probe. The binding of CA1 with aptamers resulted in a positive shift in Dirac voltageVDof the G‐FETs, the magnitude of which depended on target concentration. These aptameric G‐FET biosensors showed the binding affinity (KD) of ~2.3 ng/ml (70 pM), which is four orders lower than that reported using a gel shift assay. This lower value ofKDenabled us to achieve a detection range (10 pg/ml –100 ng/ml) which is well in line with the clinically relevant range. These highly sensitive devices allowed us to further prove their clinical relevance by successfully detecting the presence of CA1 in human saliva samples. Utilization of this label‐free biosensor could facilitate the early‐stage identification of various diseases associated with changes in concentration of CAs.
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PCB-Based Magnetometer as a Platform for Quantification of Lateral-Flow Assays
This work presents a proof-of-concept demonstration of a novel inductive transducer, the femtoMag, that can be integrated with a lateral-flow assay (LFA) to provide detection and quantification of molecular biomarkers. The femtoMag transducer is manufactured using a low-cost printed circuit board (PCB) technology and can be controlled by relatively inexpensive electronics. It allows rapid high-precision quantification of the number (or amount) of superparamagnetic nanoparticle reporters along the length of an LFA test strip. It has a detection limit of 10−10 emu, which is equivalent to detecting 4 ng of superparamagnetic iron oxide (Fe3O4) nanoparticles. The femtoMag was used to quantify the hCG pregnancy hormone by quantifying the number of 200 nm magnetic reporters (superparamagnetic Fe3O4 nanoparticles embedded into a polymer matrix) immuno-captured within the test line of the LFA strip. A sensitivity of 100 pg/mL has been demonstrated. Upon further design and control electronics improvements, the sensitivity is projected to be better than 10 pg/mL. Analysis suggests that an average of 109 hCG molecules are needed to specifically bind 107 nanoparticles in the test line. The ratio of the number of hCG molecules in the sample to the number of reporters in the test line increases monotonically from 20 to 500 as the hCG concentration increases from 0.1 ng/mL to 10 ng/mL. The low-cost easy-to-use femtoMag platform offers high-sensitivity/high-precision target analyte quantification and promises to bring state-of-the-art medical diagnostic tests to the point of care.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1928334
- PAR ID:
- 10181950
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sensors
- Volume:
- 19
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 1424-8220
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 5433
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3390/s19245433
