Author: Qi Hu
Hu, Qi, 2024 Human Serum Albumin Detection Using Aggregation Induced Emission Biosensors and Their Engineering Improvements for Screening and Monitoring Chronic Kidney Disease, Flinders University, College of Science and Engineering
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Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has become a medical problem that threatens public health across the world. Nowadays, the increasing prevalence of other diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension, along with factors like societal pressure, aging populations, and environmental pollution are all contributing to the global incidence of CKD. What is worrying is that symptoms are non-existent or minimal in the early stages of CKD until a significant amount of renal function loss. Therefore, screening and monitoring CKD becomes a crucial work in medical care with the highest priority at the initial stage. Human serum albumin (HSA) as an effective urinary biomarker is widely used to detect and determine the levels of albuminuria in CKD because it is utilized to define and measure the filtration capacity of the glomerulus in CKD owing to its concentration variation. At present, traditional techniques like colorimetry-based assays and immunoassays have mature standard operating procedures and extremely high popularity, but under the increasingly complex detection scenarios and the diverse requirements of different populations, there is still a need to develop other long-term and stable detection technologies. Fluorescence, as a rapidly emerging technology in recent decades, has attracted widespread attention on biological and chemical sensing, among which aggregation induced emission (AIE) based biosensors probably become a new solution for HSA detection in medical applications due to the advantages of simple operation, rapid response, high sensitivity, and cost efficiency. Certainly, despite researchers have reported numerous successful instances of HSA detection using AIE biosensors, this type of technique is still subject to many challenges, including external interference, restricted sensitivity, loss of FL signal, inconvenience of detection, high reagent consumption, reusability, etc. Given the aforementioned issues, it is great potential for AIE products to further modify their functionalities and achieve higher standard requirements in future medical research through engineering designs. In this work, novel AIE biosensors have been reported to achieve HSA detection and their corresponding applications in human urine at which experimental results demonstrate satisfactory FL behaviours. Afterwards, two different engineering designs, hydrogel platform and metasurface platform, are conducted to realize better performances on the basis of AIE biosensors. Ultimately, the results illustrate that some specific characterizations of HSA detection using AIE biosensors can be improved significantly via engineering designs, which means engineering improvement is a feasible and promising enhancement strategy of AIE biosensors for biomarker detection in the fields of fluorescence.
Keywords: Aggregation Induced Emission, Fluorescence Biosensors, Human Serum Albumin Detection, Chronic Kidney Disease, Engineering Improvements, Hydrogel Platform, Metasurface Platform
Subject: Biotechnology thesis
Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2024
School: College of Science and Engineering
Supervisor: Youhong Tang