Biosensors & Bioelectronics

Biography

Biography: Mariantonietta Parrracino

Abstract

With more efforts in recent years, “nanoprobes” have been widely developed and extensively utilized for the labeling of biomolecules used for the detectionof other various biological species of medical, pharmaceutical and environmental interest. In particular metal nanoparticles (such as AuNPs and AgNPs) and quantum dots have been used for the development of different biosensing platforms based mostly in electrochemical, optical and mass detection. However, the use of asymmetric nobel-metal nanoparticles as thermal labels in biosensing was not explored before the development of HEATSENS®. The present advanced HEATSENS® sensing platform combines the peculiar properties of bioengineered Au-nanoprisms/nanorods of converting the IR light energy in quantifiable thermal energy with high efficiency, with their surface functionalization with detection antibodies. The combination of the use of asymmetric metal-nanomaterial with their oriented biofunctionalization, leads to an improvement of the sensing of the molecule of interest rising specificity and sensitivity up to the atto-molar concentration. Besides, due to the characteristic of converting the IR light to thermal energy, HEATSENS® sensing platform does not present interferences as it could happen using sensing methodologies based on electrochemical or optical detection. More in detail, HEATSENS®sensing platform has been applied to the detection of molecules of interest in the agro-food field, reaching the detection of analytes in complex matrices in the sub-femtomolar concentration in a short time of analysis. The characteristics of HEATSENS®sensing platform will lead to the development of low-cost detection devices/systems for point-of–care applications enable to be used in several other application fields such as public health, environment protection and homeland security.