Periodontitis is a considerable public health problem in most of the countries. According to statistics, eight out of ten people mainly who are age over forty suffer from the dental problem, and there is a high correlation between the periodontal diseases and increased risks for many systemic complications, such as diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Even though most of the illnesses preventable, the number of patients is still growing since it is hard to get treatments at a proper time. It is because not only there is no pain in its early stage of diseases, but the current diagnosis method can just judge the occurrence of the diseases, not the discerning real-time severity of them, which makes patients’ symptom worse. To overcome the limitations, we implemented aptamers on biosensor which can quickly estimate the disease progression by quantitatively measuring the concentration of a biomarker protein in human saliva. Aptamers that specifically bind to the periodontal biomarker protein molecule were successfully screened out by using immobilization-free Graphene Oxide (GO)-SELEX. Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) and Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) assays were done as follows for analyzing the specificity and the affinity of aptamers to their target. Furthermore, by developing the aptamer-based biosensor with increased sensitivity, we could apply this biosensor to real human saliva samples. Monitoring the level of biomarker protein by obtaining the specimen in a non-invasive way, this detection system would be a preferable method which can be quickly applied in the medical diagnosis fields for detecting important biomarkers in a human body.

Early diagnosis of periodontal diseases using an aptamer-based biosensor with enhanced sensitivity

255th National Meeting (2018)

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