PolyAn has started the development of “Bioorthogonal 3D-Hydrogels for highly sensitive Biosensors (3DBioSens) in April 2018. The goal of the project is the development of innovative 3D-Hydrogels that can be loaded with sensor molecules, e.g. oligonucleotides, proteins or enzymes, and be used as biosensors for analytical applications.

Compared to conventional immunological methods, e.g. ELISA plates, Nanohydrogels enable a significantly higher loading with sensor molecules. Also, the active binding sites of the sensor molecules are better accessible. Both effects translate into a better detection of the target molecules (analytes) and thus an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio of the overall system.

Through the selection of different building blocks for the Nanohydrogel it is possible to control the mesh size, i.e. the pore size of the gels can be tailored to specific applications. This enables the integration of a filter function in the hydrogel-based sensor. The sample preparation can be simplified or even omitted due to this integrated size-specific filter effect. The overall work-flow and the complexity of the sensor can thus be improved.

This three year project is co-financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). It will be managed jointly by PolyAn and the Freie Universität Berlin.

Publication

A. Herrmann, L. Kaufmann, P. Dey, R. Haag, U. Schedler, ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2018, 10, 11382−11390

Contact

Dr. Uwe Schedler, Geschäftsführer PolyAn GmbH

Email: mail@poly-an.de

About PolyAn

PolyAn is a nanotechnology company specialized in the modification of surfaces using Molecular Surface Engineering (MSE). Since 1996 PolyAn develops and manufactures consumables for applications that require high signal-to-noise ratios. Our products include supports for microarrays, fluorescence encoded microparticles and calibration tools for fluorescence imaging systems.