Studies on high energy materials containing nitro group for bioassay development

Abstract

Demand for rapid, swift, reliable, and portable detection technologies for High Energy Materials; PETN, RDX and TNT to monitor security, safeguard and ecotoxicity is the need of the hour. Many technologies are available however they need to be confirmed through conventional techniques for reliable results. The advancing immunosensors technology has a potential to replace these conventional and laborious methods with reliable yet simple diagnostic tools. These are based on highly specific receptor-antigen interactions coupled with various advanced methods of quantification. In our study, the highly specific bioreceptors like antibodies, aptamers and peptides were generated against the explosive molecules utilizing their mimics (haptens) designed with the help of computational analysis. These receptors were further utilized in developing specific and sensitive assays for the detection of target molecules. newlineThe developed thermal and photo mediated detection strategies offer a simultaneous user friendly, specific and sensitive explosive (PETN, RDX and TNT) monitoring. The high-end aptamer-antibody FRET based sandwich assay provides detection platform with enhanced newlinesensitivity. The phage display technique used to screen specific peptide sequence for RDX detection depicts good binding which might utilize in detection platforms. These developed platforms fulfill the necessary conditions to be employed as detection tools replacing conventional techniques. However, the increased demand for rapid detection requires quick on-spot sample monitoring which is still difficult with these developed methods. Therefore, in future for on- spot monitoring, further advancements in the developed methods in combination were required to fabricate a new generation of biosensors. newline newline newline newline newline