Biosensors and Wearables
Find. Engineer. Deploy.
A lack of biosensors fundamentally limits the application of engineering to biology, and impacts society across a range of sectors including healthcare, biotechnology, drug development, environmental management, agriculture, consumer technology, and the military. We lead an interdisciplinary collaboration to discover and translate novel microbial proteins into electronic sensor devices and wearable applications. Our collaborators include Mark Grinstaff, Catherine Klapperich, Karen Allen, and Doug Densmore.
Sensor Screening
Our lab has developed a novel platform for developing inexpensive, real-time, and portable biosensors for an array of analytes. Our platform capitalizes on an enormous and largely untapped reservoir for portable and inexpensive organic biosensors: microbes. Microbial organisms have evolved over 3 billion years to sense virtually any stimulus relevant to human biology and biotechnology. They do so through molecular sensing parts that can be harvested and developed into electronic biosensors suitable for integration into any sensing device. Our platform enables screening of individual microbes (Grazon 2020 Nat Comm) and metagenomic samples to identify sensing proteins.
Sensor Engineering
Our lab develops technologies to harness microbial proteins into electronic sensor devices. Protein recognition of analytes are transduced into a flow of photons or electrons. We are the first to develop in vitro biosensors from entirely novel bacterial allosteric transcription factors (aTFs)- resulting in a real-time optical sensor for progesterone (Grazon 2020). We leverage established electrochemical strategies to engineer electrochemical sensors from redox enzymes. We have developed multiple novel electrochemical sensors including the first specific electrochemical sensor for nicotine, and an electrochemical sensor for neurotransmitters. We develop also technologies for embedding (Chen 2020 ), immobilizing (Chen 2020), and optimizing sensors.
Sensor Deployment
Our lab deploys sensors for multiple applications. These include bench-top devices, to be used in laboratories, or end user analytical devices, analogous to the fingerstick-based glucometer, or wearable devices for continuous monitoring of hormones or other analytes of interest.
We have built multiple potentiostats for different applications. Our GalaganStat is designed as a 4 channel low-cost potentiostat for research and development. We have also built the WearStat, which is a portable wireless potentiostat developed as a prototyping platform for wearable sweat-based biosensors.
We are developing The Patch to create wearable biosensors with a limited footprint by miniaturizing the potentiostat even further. The Patch will utilize microneedles to collect interstitial fluid to expand the scope of accessible analytes for continuous monitoring.
Continuous Sensing
We are interested in developing continuous biosensors multiplexing detection of different analytes from multiple matrices including sweat, saliva, interstitial fluid, blood, and urine.
As an example, the movie to the left shows continuous measurement of different concentrations of dopamine using a novel dopamine degrading enzyme and our sensor prototyping platform, the WearStat. Reproducible real-time dopamine concentration sensing is achieved.