Immunosensors Use Of Immunosensors

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Immunosensors make use of antigen-antibody interactions [1, 2] to detect a wide range of analytes which are of great interest in medical diagnostics, environmental analysis, and forensic medicine [3, 4], including pathogens [5], drugs [6], bacteria [7], toxins [8], and biomarkers [9]. Overall, immunosensors employ the same chemical approach of earliest immunoassays, but offer quicker and simpler analytical procedures that may be conducted at the point-of-care [10]. Immunosensors use an antibody immobilized as a transducer. Antigen-antibody binding event result in electrical or optical changes.
The interaction of the antigen with the immobilized antibody may be monitored using several different detection methods. In this context, electrochemical immunosensors are increasingly being used for biosensing applications [11]. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is a electrochemical technique, facilitating label-free detection [12, 13], thereby yielding significant advantages in terms of simplicity and rapidity compared to conventional immunosensing processes. The immobilization of an antibody on the transducer element is a crucial step in the preparation of immunosensors [14] [15]. Physical adsorption is the easiest immobilization method, but it suffers from random antibody orientation and poor reproducibility [16-18]. Approximately of 90% antibodies are in an inactive orientation, due to steric blocking of antigen binding sites on these antibodies [12, 19]. More-stable and reproducible antibody binding is achieved by covalent attachment, but this attachment must ensure that antigen binding sites are kept free [20]. For this purpose, antibody coupling to protein G/A has been used [21]. A more simple and effective method for Ab ...

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... urine of a pregnant woman, with a pregnancy of 3 to 5 weeks. The concentration of hCG obtained was 3.5ng/mL (17.4mIU/mL), which was in agreement with the pregnancy status.
 Please insert Figure 5 here 
4. Conclusions
In summary, a new impedimetric biosensor for hCG determination in urine has been developed. A simple approach for generating a graphene-aminated surface to which an antibody binding with a suitable orientation for antigen binding is presented. The observed resistance to electron transfer increased linearly with increasing of log(hCG) concentration. The sensor response was not affected by chemical components present in synthetic urine indicating non-specific binding.
The sensor has been applied successfully to quantitatively detect hCG in the urine of pregnant women, suggesting a successful application in point-of-care diagnostics in the near future.

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