Development of aptamers for in vivo and in vitro biosensor applications

The nylon in the clothes we wear; the paracetamol in the painkillers we eat; and LEGO® blocks we may buy for our children – they all are manufactured from chemical material based on petroleum. Most of us are blissfully unaware of how our dependency on oil, transcends the use of fuel-based transportation. Nylon is made from adipic acid made from petroleum. Paracetamol is made from phenol, which is made from petroleum and LEGO® bricks are made up of acrylonitrile, butadiene, and styrene all petroleum based monomers. To reduce our dependency on oil many pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and building block chemicals are now being sustainably produced in bacterial cell-factories. The development of new bacterial cell-factories is a difficult and expensive process, in part due to time required to screen for and optimize productions strains. A new promising way of reducing the development time is generating new and faster ways of screening and optimizing using biosensors.
In this thesis we develop new functional biological recognition modules for biosensors. These DNA- and RNA-based recognition modules are called aptamers and are developed to interact with targets of choice. Aptamers are developed through a laborious process; which suffers from high error-rates and, therefore, the process has undergone significant improvements. Here we present two new versions of aptamer development schemes that have been used to identify aptamers against snake venom toxin (with a possible pharmaceutical application) and small molecule food additives (for optimization production in cell factories). Additionally, the characterization an all-polymer physicochemical biosensor is presented for the detection of antibiotics in food products.
These results have lead to the ongoing development of a high-throughput allpolymeric biosensor device at DTU Nanotech and also resulted in extended funding of 3M DKK from the Danish National Innovation Foundation, Biosyntia and The Technical University of Denmark to advance the use of aptamers and biosensors in cell-factory development.