Drug abuse has become one of the most pressing social issues worldwide. Psychoactive drugs (such as cocaine, heroin, and synthetic ketamine) not only bring pleasure to users, but also have adverse effects on the human system, even leading to death, seriously endangering human health and safety. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a fast, sensitive, portable, and easy to operate drug detection method.
However, current drug detection methods based on chromatography, spectroscopy, and immunoadsorption are limited due to their high requirements for logistical instruments and laboratories. Compared with the above technologies, electrochemical technology is considered a more attractive detection method in the field of biological analysis. Due to its unique advantages such as simple instrument operation, fast response speed, high sensitivity, and small size of electrochemical detectors, it has received widespread attention in the field of drug detection. So far, most biosensors have focused on a single aptamer and its specificity. However, there are still limitations to individual recognition molecules in terms of their recognition sites for target molecules and their specificity in binding in complex environments. Multiaptamers can integrate the specific advantages of each aptamer, improving recognition ability in complex samples.
Recently, Professor Li Fengyu's research group from Jinan University and Professor Niu Li's research group from Guangzhou University jointly reported a highly sensitive and specific wearable electrochemical aptamer sensor for directly capturing and rapidly detecting multiple drugs in sweat. The author designed an aptamer sensor array consisting of single and double aptamers with different base compositions. Molecular docking simulations show that drugs and aptamers have different binding affinities. By extracting different characteristic values from electrochemical signals, the prepared aptamer sensing array has been proven to produce different electrochemical fingerprints for different psychoactive drugs and interfering substances.
Sixteen analytes with the same concentration or gradient concentration can be correctly identified with an accuracy rate of 100%. In addition, the wearable sensor platform has been proven to distinguish six drugs with similar chemical structures in artificial sweat and human sweat samples. This sensor array not only provides a new rapid detection method for drug detection, but also provides a research direction for the development of wearable sensors for on-site and daily detection of human biochemical information.
Source: Sensor Expert Network