Better Living Through Biosensors

Dr. Kevin Plaxco

UCSB
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and
Program in BioMolecular Science and Engineering

Date: Thursday, January 6, 2005
Time: 4:00 p.m.
Place: Engineering II, Room 3361

ABSTRACT

Contemporary analytical techniques can, given sufficient time and resources, detect trace amounts of almost any analyte. In contrast there exists no general solution to the problem of analyte detection in settings, such as civil defense and in the developing world, where speed, cost and convenience are critical constraints. In order to meet these challenging goals we are developing optical and electronic biosensor platforms based on the binding-induced folding of peptides, proteins and DNA. Our protein folding-based optical sensors provide a rapid, sensitive detection architecture generalizable to a wide range of macromolecular analytes. Our analogous electronic DNA sensor is reagentless, reusable, highly miniaturizable and combines picomolar sensitivity with greater than million-fold selectivity. The sensitivity, gain and background suppression of these folding-based sensors suggest that they may provide a means for the inexpensive and operationally convenient detection of a wide range of clinically, defense and environmentally relevant materials.