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Mimicking Body Biosensors

 

Artificial antibodies could be used in cheap, field-ready toxin sensors.

By Katherine Bourzac

 

 

Antibodies aren't a critical part of the body's defense against disease: they're also the gold standard for biosensing. These natural proteins are widely used in diagnostic tests for cancer and other diseases because they recognize and bind so efficiently to disease markers, which include bacterial and viral proteins and protein fragments. However, protein antibodies are expensive to synthesize in the lab and only last a few months. Now biochemists have developed a method to make artificial antibodies that may be just as effective as the real thing.

 

Researchers have been working on synthetic antibodies for about twenty years. Artificial antibodies, made from polymers rather than proteins, promise to be cheap and long lasting, says Kenneth Shea, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Irvine, who led development of the new method. However, no one has been able to make artificial antibodies that bind their targets as tightly and as specifically as natural antibodies do.