Abstract

Although many sophisticated methods for specific detection of a biological material (from cells, through viruses to nucleic acids and proteins) are available, there is still a need for their improvement. Particularly, an optimal method should be sensitive, rapid and quantitative. However, it appears that traditional molecular biology procedures are often either too long or semi-quantitative at best. This makes particular problems in medical and biotechnological approaches, where rapid and quantitative assays are required for either detection of specific pathogens or continuous monitoring of biotechnological processes (e.g. production of certain components by microbes in bio-reactors or detection of bacteriophage contamination in bacterial cultures). In this review, we present a recently developed nanotechnique of electric bio-chips, which appears to be suitable for rapid and quantitative detection of various biological materials. One of variants of this technique is based on miniaturized amperometric biosensor devices that enable evaluation of biomolecular interactions by measuring the redox recycling of enzymatic reaction products. Electric bio-chips were reported to be useful for detection and quantification of both biological macromolecules (nucleic acids and proteins) and microorganisms (bacteria and viruses). Thus, it appears that this technique may be successfully employed in various bio-medical and biotechnological applications.

Keywords: Electric bio-chips, detection of nucleic acids and proteins, diagnostics, monitoring of biotechnological processes