Technology.org March 24, 2020
Point-of-care diagnostics that can reduce and/or prevent unneeded antibiotic prescriptions require highly specific probes with sensitive and accurate transducers that can be miniaturized and multiplexed, and that are easy to operate and cheap. Researchers at Boston College present several advances in the use of graphene field effect transistors (G-FET) including the first use of peptide probes to electrically detect antibiotic resistant bacteria in a highly specific manner. They have reduced the needed concentration for detection by employing dielectrophoresis which allows monitoring changes in the Dirac point due to individual bacterial cells. Rapid binding of bacterial cells to a G-FET by electrical field led to 3 orders of magnitude decrease in cell-concentration and 9-fold reduction in needed time to 5 min. They demonstrated the first selective, electrical detection of the pathogenic bacterial species Staphylococcus aureus and antibiotic resistant Acinetobacter baumannii on a single platform…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
This sensor uses graphene to reveal whether a bacteria species is antibiotic resistant. Image credit: Kenneth Burch, Boston College