Paper reviews recent advances in field-deployable DNA-based water quality sensors

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Check out the new review on DNA-based biosensors for water quality monitoring by researchers from Prof. Juewen Liu’s group in the Department of Chemistry and ERG members Philippe Van Cappellen and Kunfu Pi (now a faculty member at China University of Geosciences, Wuhan). While functional DNA molecules have been used for the detection of environmental contaminants in water, their practical applications have remained limited. To address this challenge, the review paper highlights recent efforts to develop field-deployable water quality biosensors. The biosensor devices include microfluidic, lateral flow and paper-based devices, and other novel ideas such as the conversion of glucometers for the detection of environmental analytes. In addition, the paper also reviews DNA-functionalized hydrogels and their use in diffusive gradients in thin films (DGT) devices. The review paper was published as part of a special issue of TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry. It can be found at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165993622001224#!