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Current Pharmaceutical Design 2022Nucleic acid-based carbohydrate sensors (NAbCSs) constitute a strategy involving nucleic acids as recognition elements for the development of a unique, stable,... (Review)
Review
BACKGROUND
Nucleic acid-based carbohydrate sensors (NAbCSs) constitute a strategy involving nucleic acids as recognition elements for the development of a unique, stable, sensitive, mono- or multimodal detection system in the field of nanomedicine, gas sensing, and gene therapy. Thus, this advanced platform for next-generation investigation compromises cost-effective, wearable, and noninvasive sensing devices as diagnostics in healthcare.
OBJECTIVE
This review article highlights the importance of NAbCSs and explores the novel applications of sensors fabricated via the conjugation of nucleic acids and carbohydrates. Additionally, advances in smart portable devices, like smartphones, printers, and digital multimeters, are summarized, followed by the challenges involved in the development of futuristic sensing tools.
METHODS
A novel platform has been unfolded for the detection of different chemical toxins (like aflatoxin B1, ochratoxin A) and biomarkers (like miRNA in cancer) present in biosamples, food and biowarfare agents. The potential applications of biosensing in the areas of miniaturization, reusability, rapid, point-of-care or portable for home analysis techniques, cost-effective, eco-friendly, high throughput and personalized sensors for qualitative analysis of target analyte/s in bio-fluids and food have been explored.
CONCLUSION
NAbCSs provide real-time monitoring of biosamples qualitatively and semi-quantitatively (luminometer, fluorimeter, etc.) in the absence of trained personnel. Explorations of NAbCSs encompass advantages in remote resource-limited access areas with simultaneous monitoring via smart devices for multiple analytes with greater precision, sensitivity, and selectivity.
Topics: Aflatoxin B1; Biological Warfare Agents; Biomarkers; Biosensing Techniques; Carbohydrates; Humans; MicroRNAs; Nucleic Acids
PubMed: 35490323
DOI: 10.2174/1381612828666220427140110 -
Journal of Separation Science Jan 2019Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy is a constantly developing analytical method providing not only high-sensitive quantitative but also qualitative information on an... (Review)
Review
Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy is a constantly developing analytical method providing not only high-sensitive quantitative but also qualitative information on an analyte. Thus, it is reasonable that it has been tested as a promising detection method in column separations. Although its implementation in analytical separations is not widespread, some surprising results, like enormous signal enhancement and demonstrations of single-molecule identifications, proved in only a few special examples, indicate the potential of the method. The high detection sensitivity and selectivity would be of paramount importance in trace analyses of biologically relevant molecules in complex matrices. However, the combination of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy with column separation methods brings two principal issues. Interactions of analytes with metal substrates can cause deteriorations of separations and the detection can be affected by background electrolytes or elution agents. Thus, in principle, this review is on the experimental and methodological solutions to these problems. First, theoretical and practical aspects of Raman scattering, and excitation of surface plasmon in colloid suspensions of nanoparticles and on planar nanostructured substrates are briefly explained. Advances in experimental arrangements of on-line and at-line couplings with column liquid phase separation methods, including microfluidic devices, are described together with chosen analytical applications.
PubMed: 30267463
DOI: 10.1002/jssc.201800852 -
Analytical Methods : Advancing Methods... Jun 2021Biological and pharmaceutical analytes like liposomes, therapeutic proteins, nanoparticles, and drug-delivery systems are utilized in applications, such as... (Review)
Review
Biological and pharmaceutical analytes like liposomes, therapeutic proteins, nanoparticles, and drug-delivery systems are utilized in applications, such as pharmaceutical formulations or biomimetic models, in which controlling their size is often critical. Many of the common techniques for sizing these analytes require method development, significant sample preparation, large sample quantities, and lengthy analysis times. In other cases, such as DLS, sizing can be biased towards the largest constituents in a mixture. Therefore, there is a need for more rapid, sensitive, accurate, and straightforward analytical methods for sizing macromolecules, especially those of biological origin which may be sample-limited. Taylor dispersion analysis (TDA) is a sizing technique that requires no calibration and consumes only nL to pL sample volumes. In TDA, average diffusion coefficients are determined via the Taylor-Aris equation by characterizing band broadening of an analyte plug under well-controlled laminar flow conditions. Diffusion coefficient can then be interpreted as hydrodynamic radius (R) via the Stokes-Einstein equation. Here, we offer a tutorial review of TDA, intended to make the method better understood and more widely accessible to a community of analytical chemists and separations scientists who may benefit from the unique advantages of this versatile sizing method. We first provide a tutorial on the fundamental principles that allow TDA to achieve calibration-free sizing of analytes across a wide range of R, with an emphasis on the reduced sample consumption and analysis times that result from utilizing fused silica capillaries. We continue by highlighting relationships between operating parameters and critically important flow conditions. Our discussion continues by looking at methods for applying TDA to sample mixtures via algorithmic approaches and integration of capillary electrophoresis and TDA. Finally, we present a selection of reports that demonstrate TDA applied to complex challenges in bioanalysis and materials science.
Topics: Capillaries; Electrophoresis, Capillary; Hydrodynamics; Pharmaceutical Preparations; Silicon Dioxide
PubMed: 33999088
DOI: 10.1039/d1ay00588j -
Journal of Pharmaceutical and... Oct 2020Recently, volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS) has been suggested as an alternative to DBS sampling. With VAMS, a fixed volume of blood (approximately 10 μL) is...
Recently, volumetric absorptive microsampling (VAMS) has been suggested as an alternative to DBS sampling. With VAMS, a fixed volume of blood (approximately 10 μL) is wicked up by the absorbent tip of a collection device, independent of the hematocrit (HT) of the blood sample. This way, VAMS effectively avoids the HT bias which occurs in partial-punch DBS analysis. Nonetheless, the HT remains an important variable in VAMS analysis, particularly if VAMS-based blood results need to be converted to serum or plasma values to allow comparison with e.g. plasma-based therapeutic intervals. Indeed, an analyte's plasma to whole blood ratio may be HT-dependent. Therefore, we developed two straightforward methods to derive the HT value from a VAMS sample based on its potassium content. One of these methods uses an aqueous extraction procedure, whereas the other one requires an organic extraction. Both methods have the potential to be seamlessly integrated with most existing VAMS analyses, allowing both target analyte quantitation and potassium analysis on a single VAMS extract.
Topics: Blood Specimen Collection; Dried Blood Spot Testing; Hematocrit; Specimen Handling; Tandem Mass Spectrometry
PubMed: 32777731
DOI: 10.1016/j.jpba.2020.113491 -
IEEE Transactions on Visualization and... Jan 2022Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated...
Working with data in table form is usually considered a preparatory and tedious step in the sensemaking pipeline; a way of getting the data ready for more sophisticated visualization and analytical tools. But for many people, spreadsheets - the quintessential table tool - remain a critical part of their information ecosystem, allowing them to interact with their data in ways that are hidden or abstracted in more complex tools. This is particularly true for data workers [61], people who work with data as part of their job but do not identify as professional analysts or data scientists. We report on a qualitative study of how these workers interact with and reason about their data. Our findings show that data tables serve a broader purpose beyond data cleanup at the initial stage of a linear analytic flow: users want to see and "get their hands on" the underlying data throughout the analytics process, reshaping and augmenting it to support sensemaking. They reorganize, mark up, layer on levels of detail, and spawn alternatives within the context of the base data. These direct interactions and human-readable table representations form a rich and cognitively important part of building understanding of what the data mean and what they can do with it. We argue that interactive tables are an important visualization idiom in their own right; that the direct data interaction they afford offers a fertile design space for visual analytics; and that sense making can be enriched by more flexible human-data interaction than is currently supported in visual analytics tools.
PubMed: 34591767
DOI: 10.1109/TVCG.2021.3114830 -
Methods in Molecular Biology (Clifton,... 2022The separation of complex mixtures is ubiquitous throughout molecular biology, and techniques such as gel-based electrophoresis are common laboratory practice. Such...
The separation of complex mixtures is ubiquitous throughout molecular biology, and techniques such as gel-based electrophoresis are common laboratory practice. Such methods are not without their drawbacks, however, which include non-specific interactions between analyte and the separation matrix, poor yields in purification and non-continuous analyte throughput. Microfluidic techniques, which exploit physical phenomena unique to the microscale, promise to improve many aspects of traditional laboratory procedures. These methods offer a quantitative, solution-based alternative to traditional gel electrophoresis, with rapid measurement times enabling the analysis of transient or weak biomolecular interactions that would be challenging to observe with traditional methods. Here, we present a protocol for the lithographic fabrication and operation of microfluidic chips capable of free-flow electrophoretic (FFE) fractionation and analysis of biological analytes. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through a protein-sensing methodology based on FFE fractionation of DNA-protein mixtures. In addition, the FFE technique described here can be readily adapted to suit a variety of preparative and analytical applications, providing information on the charge, zeta-potential, and interactions of analytes.
Topics: Electrophoresis; Electrophoresis, Microchip; Proteins
PubMed: 35094333
DOI: 10.1007/978-1-0716-1811-0_16 -
Biochimica Et Biophysica Acta Jul 2015Technologies to assay single cells and their extracellular microenvironments are valuable in elucidating biological function, but there are challenges. Sample volumes... (Review)
Review
Technologies to assay single cells and their extracellular microenvironments are valuable in elucidating biological function, but there are challenges. Sample volumes are low, the physicochemical parameters of the analytes vary widely, and the cellular environment is chemically complex. In addition, the inherent difficulty of isolating individual cells and handling small volume samples complicates many experimental protocols. Here we highlight a number of mass spectrometry (MS)-based measurement approaches for characterizing the chemical content of small volume analytes, with a focus on methods used to detect intracellular and extracellular metabolites and peptides from samples as small as individual cells. MS has become one of the most effective means for analyzing small biological samples due to its high sensitivity, low analyte consumption, compatibility with a wide array of sampling approaches, and ability to detect a large number of analytes with different properties without preselection. Having access to a flexible portfolio of MS-based methods allows quantitative, qualitative, untargeted, targeted, multiplexed, and spatially resolved investigations of single cells and their similarly scaled extracellular environments. Combining MS with on-line and off-line sample conditioning tools, such as microfluidic and capillary electrophoresis systems, significantly increases the analytical coverage of the sample's metabolome and peptidome, and improves individual analyte characterization/identification. Small volume assays help to reveal the causes and manifestations of biological and pathological variability, as well as the functional heterogeneity of individual cells within their microenvironments and within cellular populations. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled: Neuroproteomics: Applications in Neuroscience and Neurology.
Topics: Animals; Humans; Mass Spectrometry; Peptides
PubMed: 25617659
DOI: 10.1016/j.bbapap.2015.01.008 -
Analytical Chemistry Mar 2018The virtue of chemical sensors is speed and analyte specificity. The response time to generate an analytical signal typically varies from ∼1 to 20 s, and they are...
The virtue of chemical sensors is speed and analyte specificity. The response time to generate an analytical signal typically varies from ∼1 to 20 s, and they are generally limited to a single analyte. Chemical sensors are significantly affected by multiple interferents, matrix effects, temperature, and can vary widely in sensitivity depending on the sensor format. Separation-based analyses remove matrix effects and interferents and are compatible with multiple analytes. However, the speed of such analyses has not been commensurate with traditional sensors until now. Beds of very small size with optimal geometry, containing core-shell particles of judicious immobilized selectors, can be used in an ultrahigh-flow regime, thereby providing subsecond separations of up to 10 analytes. Short polyether ether ketone lined stainless steel columns of various geometries were evaluated to determine the optimal bed geometry for subsecond analysis. Coupling these approaches provides subsecond-based detection and quantitation of multiple chiral and achiral species, including nucleotides, plant hormones, acids, amino acid derivatives, and sedatives among a variety of other compounds. The subsecond separations were reproducible with 0.9% RSD on retention times and showed consistent performance with 0.9% RSD on reduced plate height in van Deemter curves. A new powerful signal processing algorithm is proposed that can further enhance separation outputs and optical spectra without altering band areas on more complex separations such as 10 peaks under a second.
PubMed: 29437379
DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.7b04944 -
Critical Reviews in Clinical Laboratory... Oct 2016In recent decades, the study of biological variation of laboratory analytes has received increased attention. The reasons for this interest are related to the potential... (Review)
Review
In recent decades, the study of biological variation of laboratory analytes has received increased attention. The reasons for this interest are related to the potential practical applications of such knowledge. Biological variation data allow the derivation of important parameters for the interpretation and use of laboratory tests, such as the index of individuality for the evaluation of the utility of population reference intervals for the test interpretation, the estimate of significant change in a timed series of results of an individual, the number of specimens required to obtain an accurate estimate of the homeostatic set point of the analyte and analytical performance specifications that assays should fulfill for their application in the clinical setting. It is, therefore, essential to experimentally derive biological variation information in an accurate and reliable way. Currently, a dated guideline for the biological variation data production and a more recent checklist to assist in the correct preparation of publications related to biological variation studies are available. Here, we update and integrate, with examples, the available guideline for biological variation data production to help researchers to comply with the recommendations of the checklist for drafting manuscripts on biological variation. Particularly, we focus on the distribution of the data, an essential aspect to be considered for the derivation of biological variation data. Indeed, the difficulty in deriving reliable estimates of biological variation for those analytes, the measured concentrations of which are not normally distributed, is more and more evident.
Topics: Biological Variation, Population; Diagnostic Techniques and Procedures; Humans; Reference Values; Reproducibility of Results
PubMed: 26856991
DOI: 10.3109/10408363.2016.1150252 -
Electrophoresis Jan 2018Derivatisation is an integrated part of many analytical workflows to enable separation and detection of the analytes. In CE, derivatisation is adapted in the four modes... (Review)
Review
Derivatisation is an integrated part of many analytical workflows to enable separation and detection of the analytes. In CE, derivatisation is adapted in the four modes of pre-capillary, in-line, in-capillary, and post-capillary derivatisation. In this review, we discuss the progress in derivatisation from February 2015 to May 2017 from multiple points of view including sections about the derivatisation modes, derivatisation to improve the analyte separation and analyte detection. The advancements in derivatisation procedures, novel reagents, and applications are covered. A table summarising the 46 reviewed articles with information about analyte, sample, derivatisation route, CE method and method sensitivity is provided.
Topics: Electrophoresis, Capillary; Indicators and Reagents; Isomerism; Mass Spectrometry; Organic Chemicals; Spectrometry, Fluorescence; Spectrophotometry, Ultraviolet; Surface Properties
PubMed: 28758685
DOI: 10.1002/elps.201700252