AUTHOR=Vasudevan Sahana , Srinivasan Parthasarathy , Neelakantan Prasanna , Rayappan John Bosco Balaguru , Solomon Adline Princy TITLE=Photoluminescence-Based Bioassay With Cysteamine-Capped TiO2 Nanoparticles for the Selective Recognition of N-Acyl Homoserine Lactones JOURNAL=Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology VOLUME=9 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/bioengineering-and-biotechnology/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2021.750933 DOI=10.3389/fbioe.2021.750933 ISSN=2296-4185 ABSTRACT=
Currently available diagnostic procedures for infections are laborious and time-consuming, resulting in a substantial financial burden by increasing morbidity, increased costs of hospitalization, and mortality. Therefore, innovative approaches to design diagnostic biomarkers are imperative to assist in the rapid and sensitive diagnosis of microbial infections. Acyl homoserine lactones (AHLs) are ubiquitous bacterial signaling molecules that are found to be significantly upregulated in infected sites. In this pioneering work, we have developed a simple photoluminescence-based assay using cysteamine-capped titanium oxide (TiO2) nanoparticles for AHL detection. The PL intensity variation of the oxygen defect state of TiO2 was used for the biosensing measurements. The bioassays were validated using two well-studied AHL molecules (C4-HSL and 3-oxo-C12 HSL) of an important human pathogen,