Developments in biosensors for CoV detection and future trends

Abstract

This review summarizes the state of art of biosensor technology for Coronavirus (CoV) detection, the current challenges and the future perspectives. Three categories of affinity-based biosensors (ABBs) have been developed, depending on their transduction mechanism, namely electrochemical, optical and piezoelectric biosensors. The biorecognition elements include antibodies and DNA, which undergo important non-covalent binding interactions, with the formation of antigen-antibody and ssDNA/oligonucleotide-complementary strand complexes in immuno- and DNA-sensors, respectively. The analytical performances, the advantages and drawbacks of each type of biosensor are highlighted, discussed, and compared to traditional methods. It is hoped that this review will encourage scientists and academics to design and develop new biosensing platforms for point-of-care (POC) diagnostics to manage the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, providing interesting reference for future studies.

Keywords: Biosensor; COVID-19; Coronavirus; DNA-Sensor; Immunosensor; Viral detection.

Fig. 1

Schematic illustration of typical biosensor components and biosensor classification: catalytic biosensors (blu circle); immunosensors (green circle); DNA-sensors (grey circle) and aptasensors (yellow circle). (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article.)

Fig. 2

Different mechanisms of catalytic and ABBs biosensors (A) and relative examples (B): enzymatic biosensor (a), immunosensor (b) and DNA-sensor (c). A = analyte; B = biological element; P = product; AB = complex, i.e. antigen/antibody complex.

Fig. 3

Schematic classification of ABBs.

Fig. 4

Schematic representation of the FET based biosensor for SARS-CoV-2 virus detection (Seo et al., 2020).

Fig. 5

Schematic representation of the dual plasmonic photothermal LSPR biosensor for SARS-CoV-2 virus detection (Qui et al., 2020).