Advances in early diagnosis technology for severe diseases, such as cancer or neurodegenerative disease, have made it feasible to increase chance to recover diseases completely. The general method of early detection is to find out a slight change of disease-specific biomarker level exquisitely in body fluid. There exist many kinds of disease related biomarkers such as disordered DNA or microRNA, inflammatory enzymes and proteins. In particular, monitoring of proteins concentration is crucial, because disease occurrence, mainly caused by the problematic proteins, rather than that of DNA or RNA. There are several methods of measuring proteins concentration using inorganic nanoparticles or nanoarrays, polymeric nanoparticls or hydrogel based sensors. Especially, molecular reactive hydrogel based sensor using affinity binding, molecular imprinted hydrogel (MIH), is advantageous because of their simple label-free detection system, as well as high bio-applicability (implantable or wearable) and biocompatibility.<br/>Herein, we fabricated an optical sensor using targeting moiety and silica nanoparticles (SNPs) conjugated bio-responsive hydrogel to analyze protein biomarkers by measuring diffracted light. Conformational change of biotin conjugated hydrogel was observed when avidin, as a target biomarker, exist in interconnecting hydrogel networks. Meanwhile, it is well known that uniformly arrayed nanoparticles induce different diffraction of light with their distances. Therefore in this work, 50 nm SNPs as light diffraction source were incorporated with hydrogel, showed red-shifted diffraction light with hydrogel shrunk by combining of the target protein. Protein concentration was calculated by measuring red-shift of diffracted light. Altogether, we developed well-defined label-free bio-responsive hydrogel for measuring target biomarkers, which would be widely applicable in early diagnosis of severe disease as well as bio-sensing technology.

Biofragment responsive diffraction grid sensor: Using specific binding molecule conjugated hydrogel

256th National Meeting (2018)

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