Aptasensors in viral detection

ABSTRACT

Background: Aptamers are single-stranded nucleic acids, so-called ‘artificial antibodies’, identified from the randomized combinatorial library against the target by the process called ‘SELEX’ (Systematic Evolution of Ligands by EXponential enrichment). Target can have any sizes from small molecules to the whole cell, attests the versatility of aptamers to bind a wide range of targets. Aptamers have several advantages over antibodies, such as they are easy to prepare, cheaper, have no batch variations, are easy to modify, stable and most importantly, non-immunogenic. Because of these positive characteristics, aptamers are incorporated in different fields, and most attractive in the applications involving therapeutics and diagnoses (theranostics). With either aptamers alone or complementing with antibodies, several high sensitive, portable sensors have been demonstrated for use in ‘bedside analysis’. Moreover, aptamers are more amenable to chemical modifications, making them capable of utilization with the most developed aptasensors (aptamerbased sensors). Significance: The development of more sensitive aptasensors could be useful and important for medical diagnosis, identification of pathogens for the quality control of consumable items, and surveillance of emerging diseases. In fact, aptasensors have already shown their efficacy in the detection of life threatening diseases caused by early stage of viral infections. In this review, role of aptasensors in detecting pathogenic viruses are overviewed. Keywords Anti-virus; aptamer; aptasensor; bedside analysis; SELEX