Protein Nanotechnology for The New Design and Development of Biocrystals and Biosensors

Abstract

…Langmuir-Blodgett nanotemplate has played an important role in producing radiation-stable crystals … [and yields] … the lowest protein concentration at which crystals can be obtained…"

Quasi-QSPR to Predict Proteins Behavior Under Various Concentrations of Drug Using Nanoconductometric Assay

“…Conductometric monitoring of drug-gene and drug-protein interactions is of fundamental importance in the broad field of functional proteomics [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Here, we model our previously obtained findings and characterizations of an important antiblastic used in neuro-oncology (Temozolomide), interacting with selected proteins that represent predictive biomarkers of the rate survival of the patients, of the outcome of chemotherapy and resistance to drug itself (namely, BRIP1 and MLH1) acquired with Nucleic Acid Programmable Protein Arrays (NAPPA)-based nanoconductometric sensor [9][10][11].…”

Ab Initio Semi-Quantitative Analysis of Micro-Beam Grazing-Incidence Small-Angle X-Ray Scattering (Μ-GISAXS) during Protein Crystal Nucleation and Growth

“…Protein crystallization is a challenging issue for solving and determining the crystallographic structures of molecules of crucial medical importance: it is a time-consuming, highly demanding task, characterized by many rate-limiting steps and bottlenecks [1][2][3][4][5].…”

Prototypes of Newly Conceived Inorganic and Biological Sensors for Health and Environmental Applications

“…In the QCM_D sensor [12] each quartz contained 4×4 NAPPA spots of 300-micron square and functional proteins were synthesized in situ directly from printed cDNAs (complementary DNAs) just before the assay [4,12]. Standard nanogravimetry exploited the piezoelectric quartz crystals’ properties to vary the resonance frequency, f, when a mass, Δm, was adsorbed to or desorbed from their surface according to the Sauerbrey equation: $\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }f}{f_0}=-\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }m}{A\rho l}$where f 0 is the fundamental frequency, A is the gold area and ρ and l are the quartz density and thickness, respectively [7–9].…”

“…Quartz resonators used in fluids are more than mere mass or thickness sensors; sensor response depends also on the viscoelastic properties of the adhered biomaterial, surface charges of adsorbed molecules and surface roughness. The modern QCM_D technology utilizing impedance measurement (as in the sensor introduced in references [3,12]) offers access to the resonance bandwidth in addition to resonance frequency. Bandwidth value is strictly connected with the viscoelastic properties of the sample [8,9].…”

“…The addition of a C -terminal glutathione S -transferase (GST) tag to each protein enabled its capture on the array through an antibody to GST printed simultaneously with the expression plasmid [10,11]. In the present research, we coupled QCM_D and QCM_F with NAPPA technology [3,12], optimizing the monitoring in real time of the kinetics of the reaction to obtain information not only concerning the mass, but also on the viscosity of the sample and sensing the interaction among a query protein and the expressed protein.…”