Aptasensors for emerging environmental pollutans

Abstract

With the increasing incidences of hazards to human health, agriculture and ecosystems, the regular monitoring of environmental contaminants such as toxins, pathogens, pharmaceuticals, resulting in various environmental borne diseases are highly recommended. As an example, according to World Health Organization (WHO), the increased mortality of food borne and waterborne diarrheal diseases resulting in 2.2 million deaths per annum, out of which mostly (1.9 million) are children’s. In the recent years, the stubbornly increasing public health problems and food contamination of environmental pollutants has increased the demands of designing and fabricating the more reliable and field suitable technologies for cost effective and on-site analysis. Recently, the advances in the nucleic acid research led to the identification of specific oligonucleotides acid sequences, which are highly specific to their cognate targets and known as “aptamers”. Aptamers as synthetic bio-recognition element can be in-vivo generated against a variety of analytes such as organic ions/protein/macromolecules with dissociation constants typically varying from the micro to pico-molar range. Recently, the aptamer have been widely exploited to develop the aptamer- based biosensors, commonly known as aptasensors. Aptasensors represents the novelty in the environmental and analytical science with their promising performance of high selectivity, sensitivity and stability over conventional analytical tools. In the present work, the aptasensors presented has focused on the recent advances in the development of aptamer based electrochemical or optical sensors for environmental applications with special emphasis on emerging pollutants described in the literature or develop in our laboratory BAE.