Paper: "Review—Chemical and Biological Sensors for Viral Detection"

[cdev]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7106559/

"Infectious diseases commonly occur in contaminated water, food, and bodily fluids and spread rapidly, resulting in death of humans and animals worldwide. Among infectious agents, viruses pose a serious threat to public health and global economy because they are often difficult to detect and their infections are hard to treat. Since it is crucial to develop rapid, accurate, cost-effective, and in-situ methods for early detection viruses, a variety of sensors have been reported so far. This review provides an overview of the recent developments in electrochemical sensors and biosensors for detecting viruses and use of these sensors on environmental, clinical and food monitoring. Electrochemical biosensors for determining viruses are divided into four main groups including nucleic acid-based, antibody-based, aptamer-based and antigen-based electrochemical biosensors. Finally, the drawbacks and advantages of each type of sensors are identified and discussed.

Keywords: Electroanalytical Electrochemistry, Sensors, electrochemical biosensors, virus detection


The Challenge of Viral Diseases Worldwide

Viral infections represent a grave threat to public health as well as the global economy. Viral infections mostly occur through contaminated water, food, and/or bodily fluids, spread rapidly and result in death of humans and animals worldwide.1,2 Significant concerns has raised due to the increased viral outbreaks, since the viruses could quickly spread and cause a pandemic. Thus, rapid and accurate detection can mean the difference between life and death during viral infections. Analytes such as viral nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), viral proteins, intact viral particles, and antibodies generated by the patient immune response against the virus have been used to detect viruses with the goal of being used in clinical situations. These analytes are detected using a variety of traditional methods including polymerase chain reaction (PCR), virus culture, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), western blots, and serological antibody detection methods.3,4 However, conventional techniques are often not suitable for rapid on-site analysis as they require virus isolation and biocontainment, the ability to grow cultured cells for cytopathology-related assay, and/or sophisticated and expensive laboratory tools that are difficult to transport and use at the point of care. Traditional laboratory-based assays are also time-consuming, labor-intensive, and can in some cases relatively insensitive, and in all cases require samples to be transported to centralized diagnostic laboratories for testing.5,6 These factors increase time-to-answer and costs while reducing the quality of patient care.

Sensors consist of chemical or biological receptors that specifically interacts with a target analyte, and a transducer that converts the recognition process into a quantitative signal.7 Electrochemical sensors are based on reaction with the chemical solutions and generate an electrical signal that is proportional to the analyte concentration.8 The electrochemical techniques can be classified into four major groups including potentiometry, amperometry, cyclic voltammetry, and impedimetry.9 The electrochemical methods are suitable for real time viral detection because of their high sensitivity and selectivity, low cost, simple operation, portability and fast analysis.10

Viral biosensors offer exciting alternatives to traditional diagnostic assays and have the potential to provide inexpensive, sensitive, rapid, miniaturized, and portable platforms when compared to conventional laboratory-based methods. Biosensors are analytical devices that couple biological recognition elements such as enzymes, antibodies, or nucleic acids with a transducer that can detect the interaction of the analyte, and can be applied for medical diagnosis, environmental monitoring, food, water and agricultural product processing.11 The goal of this review is to explore recent developments in electrochemical biosensors for viruses and viral infections. The review is divided by analyte type and is intentionally not all inclusive given the large numbers of publications in this field."