Title: Electrochemical Biosensor for Virus Detection

Biography:

Ankan Dutta Chowdhury has completed his PhD in the year of 2015 from Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, under Calcutta University. Later he did 2 years Postdoctoral Studies from National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Currently, he has been working as JSPS Postdoctoral fellow in Shizuoka University, Japan. He has published more than 20 papers in peer reviewed journals and two book chapters.

Abstract

Viruses are a major cause of human diseases which needs an early detection to prevent an outbreak. The development of biosensor would ideally produce a quantitative signal for individual viral particles. In this work, a pulse-triggered ultrasensitive electrochemical sensor has been fabricated using graphene quantum dots (Ankan Dutta Chowdhury and Ruey-an Doong) and gold-embedded polyaniline nanowires, prepared via interfacial polymerization and then self-assembly approach (Ankan Dutta Chowdhury, Rupali Gangopadhyay and Amitabha De). Introducing an external electrical pulse during the virus accumulation step increases the sensitivity towards viruses due to the expanded surface of the virus particle as well as the antibody-conjugated polyaniline chain length, compared to other conventional electrochemical sensors (Ankan Dutta Chowdhury, Kenshin Takemura, Tian-Cheng Li, Tetsuro Suzuki and Enoch Y. Park). Under optimal condition, the proposed biosensor demonstrates its ability to detecting viruses in a wide linear range with a low detection limit of 96.7 copies mL-1. In addition, the virus samples that collected from cell culture supernatant and fecal specimens of infected monkey were also used to confirm its applicability. The sensitivity is similar with that detected by real-time quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain (RT-qPCR). The result suggests that the proposed sensor can pave the way for the development of robust, high-performance sensing methodologies for virus detection.