Development and commissioning of novel ligand free nanostructures for biosensors

Project Description

A new technique of Confined Atmospheric Pulsed-laser (CAP) deposition for the one-step, green synthesis of nanostructured surfaces has been developed with the aim of applying them in a final biosensing platform. Preliminary thiol functionalisation tests have been conducted to confirm that this method will be suitable for future biofunctionalization in the development of our sensors. These results have indicated that the conjugation of molecules to the surface via standard gold-thiol interactions occurs as expected, meaning once we can begin shortly biofunctionalization and sensor testing with these platforms. The application of these nanostructures produced via CAP in a biosensing platform is being examined. Biofunctionalization of the surfaces will be performed and tests will then be performed to measure their conductometric and spectroscopic responses to the target analyte for the purposes of developing a quantitative sensing device. Future work will include application of the thiol compounds suitable for surface pacification (6-mercaptohexanol). The initial tests might show very low sensitivity, in which case we intended to attempt to increase the sensitivity by immobilising PLA produced AuNPs on the existing structures, which could be achieved through the use of aminophenol compound coupled to the surface as a diazonium salt. This platform will be developed initially with DNA probe based testing, later moving to a more complex aptamer based sensor.

Funding Body

SFI IvP