Development of Ultra-sensitive and Super-rapid Biosensors

. Versatile Platform for Detection of Antibiotics, Lipids, Small Molecules & Drug Screening .

Proteins and enzymes are created by nature to recognize specifically their partners of interacting molecules. They are thus excellent materials for constructing tailor-made biosensors if connected to a signal generating part. By studying their crystal structures and amino acid sequences from protein data banks, we use rational design approach to guide the selection of suitable amino acid residues to be replaced by other residues. This innovative approach allows the construction of a mutant with a unique cysteine residue near the ligand or substrate binding site to be labeled with an environment-sensitive fluorophore for the purpose of bio-sensing. So far, using this approach and in collaboration with others, our group has successfully constructed a variety of novel and patentable fluorescent biosensors for detecting beta-lactam antibiotics from milk, arginine (amino acid) from blood, and vitamin A from blood.

We are also interested in elucidating bio-sensing mechanisms of our different fluorescent biosensors. We have proposed and are testing the hypothesis that a tailor-made fluorescent biosensor can be constructed by rational approach to sense a specific molecule which is a ligand or substrate for a particular protein or enzyme. This approach allows the development of a universal protein-based biosensor construction method to detect a large variety of important small molecules in the body.