Human perpetual exposure to several pollutants such as smoke, radiation, and toxic chemical substances, causes an excessive production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), that leads to the onset of neurodegeneration diseases. This knowledge has highlighted the importance of frequent monitoring people health with innovative biosensors able to detect pathological conditions at the initial stage. Indeed, it is mainly stated that neurodegenerative diseases can be effectively treated only if diagnosed very early. In this context, the structural aggregation of biomolecules in different districts of the brain, seem to play a key role in the neurodegeneration development mechanism becoming eligible targets for an early diagnosis. Hereby, we propose an innovative technique for detecting such biomolecules, e.g. Tau, by exploiting a pyro-electrohydrodynamic effect that is able to generate and accumulate tiny droplets of analyte on the surface of a reactive glass slide. We call the technique p-jet and we tested it in case of serial dilutions of Tau protein to demonstrate the consistency of the procedure under an immunodetection-based protocol.
The presence of microgravity and ionizing radiation during spaceflight missions causes excessive Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) production that contributes to oxidative cellular stress and multifunctional damage in astronauts. This knowledge has underlined the importance of frequent monitoring of astronaut’s health to have early diagnoses. In this scenario, the biosensor diagnostic devices could offer the necessary analytical performance to study pathological astronaut conditions. Herein, we propose an innovative biosensor for detecting highly diluted biomarkers at picogram level by using the pyro-electrohydrodynamic jet (p-jet) system. The detection limit of the system was confirmed using a model protein as the Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA) by optimizing its deposition on different functionalized glass substrates through different chemical reactions starting with a manual procedure. Based on these results, the epoxy glass activated surface was chosen as the best slide for p-jet experiments. The characterization of the processes was performed through different spectroscopic techniques such as infrared-spectroscopy (IR) or confocal fluorescence. In the context of long-term human missions, our revolutionary approach could be extremely useful to monitor the astronaut health.
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