Graphene Quantum Dots as Nanozymes for Electrochemical Sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in Milk and Human Serum

Yersinia enterocolitica is a gram-negative bacillus shaped bacterium that leads to a zootonic disease called yersiniosis. The infection is demonstrated as mesenteric adenitis, acute diarrhea, terminal ileitis, and pseudoappendicitis. Rarely, it can even result in sepsis. According to the 2017 report of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), Y. enterocolitica has been realized as the third most common foodborne-zoonotic disease after campylobacteriosis and salmonellosis in the European Union.*

Several studies suggested that the bacterium cannot survive after a proper pasteurization process, although contrary findings were also reported. The quick and accurate detection of the bacterium from food products or the body fluids of infected individuals is, therefore, important.*

Biosensors offer strong alternatives to the already existing detection techniques for rapid and sensitive quantification of Y. enterocolitica.*

In their paper “Graphene Quantum Dots as Nanozymes for Electrochemical Sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in Milk and Human Serum” Sumeyra Savas and Zeynep Altintas describe a novel immunosensor approach using graphene quantum dots (GQDs) as enzyme mimics in an electrochemical sensor set up to provide an efficient diagnostic method for Y. enterecolitica.*

The developed method can be used for any pathogenic bacteria detection for clinical and food samples without pre-sample treatment. Offering a very rapid, specific and sensitive detection with a label-free system, the GQD-based immunosensor can be coupled with many electrochemical biosensors.*

The bare gold, GQD-laminated, and antibody-immobilized sensor surfaces were characterized by atomic force microscopy (AFM) using NanoWorld Pointprobe® NCLR AFM probes.*

Figure 4 from “Graphene Quantum Dots as Nanozymes for Electrochemical Sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in Milk and Human Serum“ by S. Savas and Z. Altintas:
AFM analysis of bare (A), GQD-laminated (B), and antibody-immobilized (C) sensor surfaces.

*Sumeyra Savas and Zeynep Altintas
Graphene Quantum Dots as Nanozymes for Electrochemical Sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in Milk and Human Serum
Materials 2019, 12(13), 2189
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ma12132189

Please follow this external link to read the full article: https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/12/13/2189

Open Access The article “Graphene Quantum Dots as Nanozymes for Electrochemical Sensing of Yersinia enterocolitica in Milk and Human Serum “ by Sumeyra Savas and Zeynep Altintas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

We’re at the Biophysical Society Meeting in San Diego this week

We’re at NanoAndMore USA booth no. 818 at the Biophysical Society Meeting in San Diego this week. Have you already visited us and found out what’s up with the giant AFM probe at the booth?

Finally we can exhibit something you can see with your bare eyes. Check out our big and even bigger AFM probe models at NanoAndMore USA booth no. 818 at the Biophysical Society exibit

The free energy landscape of retroviral integration

Retroviral integration, the process of covalently inserting viral DNA into the host genome, is a point of no return in the replication cycle. Yet, strand transfer is intrinsically iso-energetic and it is not clear how efficient integration can be achieved.*

In the article “The free energy landscape of retroviral integration” published in Nature Communications Willem Vanderlinden, Tine Brouns, Philipp U. Walker, Pauline J. Kolbeck, Lukas F. Milles, Wolfgang Ott, Philipp C. Nickels, Zeger Debyser and Jan Lipfert use biochemical assays, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and multiplexed single-molecule magnetic tweezers (MT) to study tetrameric prototype foamy virus (PFV) strand-transfer dynamics.*

Their finding that PFV intasomes employ auxiliary-binding sites for modulating the barriers to integration raises the question how the topology of higher-order intasomes governs integration of pathogenic retroviruses, most notably HIV. The single-molecule assays developed in this work are expected to be particularly useful to further unravel the complexity of this important class of molecular machines.*

The AFM images were recorded in amplitude modulation mode under ambient conditions and by using NanoWorld high resolution SuperSharpSiliconSSS-NCH cantilevers ( resonance frequency ≈300 kHz; typical end-radius 2 nm; half-cone angle <10 deg). Typical scans were recorded at 1–3 Hz line frequency, with optimized feedback parameters and at 512 × 512 pixels.*

Figure 2 e, f and g from “The free energy landscape of retroviral integration” by Willem Vanderlinden et al. 
(please refer to the full article for the complete figure 2  https://rdcu.be/b0R63 ) :
  e Atomic Force Microscopy image of intasomes incubated briefly (2 min) with supercoiled plasmid DNA, depicting a branched complex as found in ~50% of early complexes.
  f  Atomic Force Microscopy image of a bridging complex that dominates (~80%) the population of complexes at longer (>45 min) incubation. 
 g  Atomic Force Microscopy image of a gel-purified STC
Figure 2 e, f and g from “The free energy landscape of retroviral integration” by Willem Vanderlinden et al.
(please refer to the full article for the complete figure 2 https://rdcu.be/b0R63 ) :
 e AFM image of intasomes incubated briefly (2 min) with supercoiled plasmid DNA, depicting a branched complex as found in ~50% of early complexes.
 f AFM image of a bridging complex that dominates (~80%) the population of complexes at longer (>45 min) incubation.
g AFM image of a gel-purified STC

*Willem Vanderlinden, Tine Brouns, Philipp U. Walker, Pauline J. Kolbeck, Lukas F. Milles, Wolfgang Ott, Philipp C. Nickels, Zeger Debyser, Jan Lipfert
The free energy landscape of retroviral integration
Nature Communications volume 10, Article number: 4738 (2019)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12649-w

Please follow this external link to read the full article: https://rdcu.be/b0R63

Open Access The article “The free energy landscape of retroviral integration“ by Willem Vanderlinden, Tine Brouns, Philipp U. Walker, Pauline J. Kolbeck, Lukas F. Milles, Wolfgang Ott, Philipp C. Nickels, Zeger Debyser and Jan Lipfert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.