Proposal to develop biosensor system for rapid diagnosis of infection Essay

Proposal to develop biosensor system for rapid diagnosis of infection with drug-resistant mycobacterium tuberculosis (TB) in accident and ER in hospital - Essay Example It potentially kills more adults than any other infectious agent. Detection of infectious pulmonary cases at early stages of infection is imperative to gain control over the bacilli and also its spread. The most prevalent method of screening Mycobacterium tuberculosis is Mantoux TB test, where an injection is given under the patient’s skin and localised reaction is observed for up to 72 hrs. The test is slow, clumsy, requires specialist laboratory facilities and is only effective for detecting advanced disease, it is influenced by multiple factors and delivers false positive or false negative results and requires further testing and interpretations (News release). Research is going on constantly to develop rapid and accurate methodologies and techniques to detect the causal organism associated with tuberculosis. In the past two decades research is being carried out for the development of biosensors and biochips to understand the biological and medical fields and to quantify biomolecules (Vo-Dinh, 2000). It is manifested that organisms have some kind of bioreceptors; biosensors are developed as a means of chemical analysis with high selectivity (Vo-Dinh, 2000). Biosensors are chemical sensors that exploit the high selectivity and sensitivity of a biologically active material (Kumar, 2000). A biosensor can be defined as a device that consists of a biological recognition system called a bioreceptors and a transducer. When the analyte interacts with the bioreceptor (a molecular species e.g. an antibody, an enzyme, a protein, or a nucleic acid or cell, tissue or whole organism), it is measured by transducer as it converts information into an elect rical signal (Vo-Dinh, 2000). Biosensors have the advantage of being simple and low-cost instruments, fast response time, require less sample pre-treatment and display high sample throughput. With the advances in research in this area, novel treatments are required to provide