Development of Bioscaffold for Detection of Cell Metabolics

Student: Yang Tian

Degree: Ph.D., August 2024

Major Professor: Dr. Ryan Tian

Research Area(s):

Biological Materials & Devices

Nanoscale Materials & Devices

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Background/Relevance

  • The virus detection methods such as PCR and ELISA have built-in problems  of being expensive, or labor-intensive, slow, user-unfriendly, and high false positive and false negative rates

  • These methodologies cannot distinguish if viral RNAs and proteins are from live or dead viruses

Innovation

  • The ultrafast ion transport on a new nanocomposite affords a low-cost, wireless, sensitive virus RFID-sensor newly

  • The new sensor is first time used on sensing living virus and verifying infection- or vaccination-induced antibodies’ efficacy

Approach

  • Optimize the nanocomposite morphologies and structure using new nanosynthesis routes
  • Optimize the sensor using new coating methods
  • Optimize the sensor set up
  • Analyze the ultrahigh frequency sensing data
  • Develop the new metabolomic virus-sensor concept based on the data
  • Simulate the charge transport to help optimize the sensor design

Key Results

  • The nanocomposite is biocompatible
  • The novel nano-RFID sensor can detect the living viruses at both room temperature and 37°C
  • Detect the effectiveness about the COVID19 antibodies which can largely help the vaccine development

Conclusions

  • The new nanocomposite has high ionic conductivity due to the special lattice- and surface-structures

  • This virus-sensor is highly biocompatible and sensitive, ideal for identifying whether the virus is alive and infectious or not

Future Work

  • Dope different transition metals into the nanowire  to boost the nanowire conductivity and in turn the sensors sensitivity

  • Develop the handheld palm size wireless detector

  • Turn the cell-culture wells to the array of in-situ, real-time, wireless monitors