Month: December 2022

Following a long-standing tradition, the Faculty and Staff from our Department celebrated the end of another great year. Many thanks to everyone that was able to join us and (of course) to Wendy Marshall and Bill Pennington for all the work done to host this event.

Please visit our Facebook page to see all the pictures of the event.

Congrats to Lucas Ayres, Jordan Brooks, Kristi Whitehead, and Carlos D Garcia for their article Rapid Detection of Staphylococcus aureus Using Paper-Derived Electrochemical Biosensors, featured as a cover of the prestigious journal Analytical Chemistry.

This paper describes the development of a sensor for the detection of S. aureus using paper-derived carbon electrodes, modified with a thin layer of sputtered gold (that minimizes lateral resistivity and significantly improves the electron transfer process) and with chitosan (used as a binder and coffering flexibility). To control the proposed biosensor, a custom-built potentiostat was developed and applied to detect (via a wireless connection) the presence of the bacteria via the oxidation of the ferrocyanide (produced from ferricyanide by the bacteria’s respiration cycle). The combined use of this wearable sensor with the instrument was also demonstrated by detecting the presence of S. aureus under optimized experimental conditions, in 20 minutes, and without relying on protein-based biorecognition elements. This is a promising avenue for the implementing of paper-derived electrodes towards a wide variety of wearable systems to monitor skin infections in low-income settings. You can read the full article at https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.2c03970

Analytical Chemistry 94 (2022) 16847–16854