Colorimetric Biosensors for Bacterial Detection

Abstract

For thousands of years, humans have suffered from food poisoning as a result of microbial contamination. Pathogenic microbes can cause numerous illnesses, from minor skin infections to life-threatening diseases. Conventional detection techniques are often time-consuming, requiring trained personnel, sophisticated instruments, and long processing times, making their online implementation impossible for control of biomedical problems. Thus, new types of highly sensitive, selective, low-cost, and nanostructured biosensors are being developed, capable of detecting microbial pathogens in a variety of fields (e.g., clinical diagnostics, food analysis, and environmental monitoring). These methods use nanomaterials such as gold nanoparticles, quantum dots, graphene, graphene oxides, magnetic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, inorganic nanowires/nanorods, plasmonic nanostructures, and photonic crystals in the construction of colorimetric biosensor sensing platforms. This chapter describes pioneering work in the development of colorimetric biosensors capable of detecting microbial pathogens qualitatively and quantitatively.