aptasensors in health, environment and food safety monitoringaptasensors在卫生、环境和食品安全的监控.pdfVIP

Open Journal of Applied Biosensor, 2012, 1, 9-19 / 10.4236/ojab.2012.12002 Published Online August 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/ojab) Aptasensors in Health, Environment and Food * Safety Monitoring 1 1 2 1,2# Arghya Sett , Suradip Das , Pragya Sharma , Utpal Bora 1Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India 2Centre for the Environment, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India Email: #ubora@iitg.ernet.in, ubora@ Received July 10, 2012; revised August 8, 2012; accepted August 15, 2012 ABSTRACT Biosensors have been developed using various types of sensing elements like biomacromolecules (viz. enzymes, anti- bodies, receptors, nucleic acids, etc.) organelles, tissues, intact cells of both microorganisms and higher organisms. A recent trend is the emergence of aptamers as sensing elements that has the potential to replace all the above ligands. This is possible due to the unique features of aptamers (sensitivity, specificity, reusability, stability, non-immunogenic- ity), which can be easily exploited in biosensor technology. Aptasensors are thus basically biosensors based on aptam- ers as ligand molecules. Here we review the various applications of aptasensors in health (specifically in diagnostics), food industry and environmental monitoring. Keywords: Aptamer; Biosensor; Clinical Diagnosis; Food Safety; Environmental Pollution Control 1. Introduction ligands to sense targeted analytes.