3-D antibody arrays offer better sensing

Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - 00:31 in Physics & Chemistry

Exploiting a process known as molecular self-assembly, MIT chemical engineers have built three-dimensional arrays of antibodies that could be used as sensors to diagnose diseases such as malaria or tuberculosis. These sensors, which contain up to 100 stacked layers of antibodies, offer much more sensitivity than existing antibody-based sensors, which have only a single layer of antibodies. “The more antibodies you put on a surface, the lower the concentration of molecules you can detect,” says Bradley Olsen, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT. “You can have a big impact on biosensors by potentially improving the sensitivity by several orders of magnitude.” Olsen is the senior author of the study, which appears in the journal Angewandte Chemie. The paper’s lead author is MIT postdoc Xue-Hui Dong, and former postdoc Allie Obermeyer is also an author. Layered assembly The team’s new design approach relies on a phenomenon known as self-assembly, which occurs when thermodynamic interactions...

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