Immuno-Ligated Single Wall Nanotube-Impregnated Paper Strips for Biosensing

Date of Award

8-2018

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Chemical and Paper Engineering

First Advisor

Dr. Brian Young

Second Advisor

Dr. Andro Mondala

Third Advisor

Dr. James Springstead

Keywords

Biosensor, paper strips, 5WNT, antibody, resistance, nanotube

Access Setting

Masters Thesis-Abstract Only

Restricted to Campus until

8-2028

Abstract

The ability to develop and produce a rapid, cost-effective point-of-use immunodiagnostic has been the focus of much attention in recent years. These devices are not readily available in third world countries, because of technology challenges affecting performance (specificity, sensitivity, precision, reproducibility and stability) and prohibitive costs of manufacturing. The work planned in this thesis proposal is to evaluate the potential of new disposable immunobiosensor technology. Preliminary work in our laboratory identified a method for creating immuno-ligated single wall nanotube-impregnated and chemically-crosslinked paper strips and a testing protocol that showed dramatically enhanced macromolecule capture and electron flow retardation within the strips. The goal of this work was to identify an expandable matrix (porous paper strip) that when loaded with conductive single walled nanotubes together with antibody followed by covalent attachment would show after testing with a solution containing a target molecule (the antibody’s corresponding antigen) a change in the strip’s electrical resistance that could be correlated to the amount of specific binding of the antigen. These experiments showed that increased antigen specific binding leads to increased strip resistance over an antigen concentration range of 4 orders of magnitude with a limit of detection response of 1.6 nM in antigen concentration. Experiments were limited by our instrumentation that could only measure resistances of less than 120 MΩs. Therefore, an ideal range was not found and applicability would be currently limited. The conclusive results are that there was an increase in resistance of all Test strips due to specific antigen binding when compared to Reference strips, but high strip to strip variance deterred the precision in antigen detection. At this time there needs to be more experiments done to remove/ reduce strip to strip variance.

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