In a follow-up from our previous paper on point-of-care sensors for C-reactive protein (CRP), an article based on the same principle was just published in ACS Sensors. 1 There are two main differences: instead of a peptide as recognition element, we used a nanobody, and we used a new smartphone-based potentionstat.
A nanobody, or single-domain antibody, is a small part of an antibody that also function as recognition element. The nanobody is significantly smaller than the antibody, only about 1/10th the size, so the packing density on the sensor surface can be completely different. Here, we used nanobodies from a llama that were prepared by our collaborator Ario de Marco in Nova Gorica in Slovenia.
The potentiostat we used was made by the company Silicon Craft Technology in Thailand. They kindly donated us a credit card-sized potentiostat that was powered by the the near-field communications module on a smartphone. We compared the results from this device with the measurements using a standard laboratory potentiostat. The results were very similar.
Again, this work was mainly done by Meen, who is now with Elena Ferapontova in Aarhus in Denmark. We wish her the best of luck there. Of course also thanks to our friends in the Surface Nanoengineering group and our Slovenian partner.
- S. Boonkaew, K. Szot-Karpińska, J. Niedziółka-Jönsson, A. de Marco, M. Jönsson-Niedziółka
NFC Smartphone-based electrochemical microfluidic device integrated with nanobody recognition for C-reactive protein, Accepted, (link)(preprint on ChemRxiv).
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