(157h) Gold Leaf Electrochemical Biosensors for Detection of Infectious Diseases

Infectious diseases are significantly more prevalent in low-resource settings (LRS) due to inadequate access to preventable diagnostic testing. A major area of research is using inexpensive and simple equipment for the development of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics that can be carried out in LRS. Biosensors comprise many POC diagnostics. Specifically, electrochemical biosensors utilize biorecognition elements coupled with electrochemical transduction to enable portable, sensitive, and specific detection of the target analyte. Gold electrodes are a common substrate for electrochemical biosensors due to strong gold-thiol coupling. However, gold electrodes are too costly and their fabrication is too laborious for implementation in LRS. To make gold electrodes more broadly accessible, our lab has worked on developing gold-leaf electrodes that are affordable and do not require any specialized equipment to fabricate, making them suitable for use in LRS. We have demonstrated that these electrodes can detect human papillomavirus (HPV) from clinical samples, although this was limited to single plex disease detection. Our current work focuses on further developing the gold leaf electrodes to enable multiplexed detection. In pursuit of this goal, we have redesigned the electrodes to enable spatial multiplexing of numerous pathogens Specifically, we are using the electrodes in conjunction with CRISPR-based assays to simultaneously detect mycobacterium tuberculosis and SARS-CoV-2. Concurrently, we are using the electrodes to study protein-nucleic interactions with the goal of developing improved hairpin biosensors that can also be used for disease detection. Overall, we have expanded the functionality of the gold leaf electrodes so they can be used for a wide range of diagnostics in LRS.