Strategies for Surface Immobilization of Whole Bacteriophages: A Review

Abstract

Bacteriophage immobilization is a key unit operation in emerging biotechnologies, enabling many new possibilities for biodetection of pathogenic microbes at low concentration, production of materials with novel antimicrobial properties, and fundamental research on bacteriophages themselves.Wild type bacteriophages exhibit extreme binding specificity for a single species -and often for a particular subspecies -of bacteria. Since their specificity originates in epitope recognition by capsid proteins, which can be altered by chemical or genetic modification, their binding specificity may also be redirected towards arbitrary substrates or a variety of analytes in 2 addition to bacteria. The immobilization of bacteriophages on planar and particulate substrates is thus an area of active and increasing scientific interest. This review assembles the knowledge gained so far in the immobilization of whole phage particles, summarizing the main chemistries and presenting the current state-of-the-art both for an audience well-versed in bioconjugation methods as well as for those who are new to the field.

Rapid fabrication of interdigitated electrodes by laser ablation with application to electrokinetically enhanced surface plasmon resonance imaging

“…Electrodes of width 15 µm and larger can be easily achieved with this method, while retaining compatibility with popular gold-thiol conjugation chemistry. 19 In this work, no attempt was made to modify the device control software, yet there are surely improvements to be made on our results if software-level limitations can be relaxed, for example by removing minimum allowable hatching overlaps.…”

“…18 Although intriguing results have been obtained with these methods, each suffers from various drawbacks including poor pattern reproduction, large minimum feature sizes, large variability that depend on fabrication parameters etc. Furthermore, use of unorthodox materials to form the IDEs may prove incompatible with popular bioconjugation methods such as thiol-gold immobilization 19,20 , introducing complication downstream of the IDE fabrication.…”

Bacteriophage-Based Biosensors: A Platform for Detection of Foodborne Bacterial Pathogens from Food and Environment

“…Bacteriophage immobilization is the principal factor that determines the efficient detection of bacterial pathogens on a specific platform [ 69 ]. Various strategies have been established for the immobilization of phages on the electrode surface ( Figure 3 ).…”

Container material dictates stability of bacteriophage suspensions: Light scattering and infectivity measurements reveal mechanisms of infectious titre decay

“…Bacteriophages (phages) have been employed in a remarkable variety of applications (O'Connell et al, 2021) including in vivo treatment of pathogenic bacteria (Kakasis & Panitsa, 2019), as a vaccine vector (Staquicini et al, 2021), and as surrogates for the study of eukaryotic viruses in water remediation facilities (Hu et al, 2003; Langlet et al, 2008) and SARS‐CoV‐2 survival in microdroplets (Fedorenko et al, 2020). In each of these contexts, it is essential to understand any changes in particle size and concentration that may occur; be it through aggregation, inactivation, adsorption onto labware surfaces or some other effect that causes an evolution of the measured infectious titre.…”