About this Research Topic
In vitro diagnostics (IVDs) is one of the most important technologies for modern medical care. Through the detection of potential disease biomarkers in biological samples taken from the human body, IVDs can obtain the clinical information of patients and thus help physicians develop treatment protocols, which makes them particularly suitable for disease prevention and diagnosis, treatment monitoring, and prognosis judgment. Biomedical sensors have been widely used in IVDs for decades owing to the advantages that originated from the specific interactions of biomolecules. The specific interactions of biomolecules (e.g., antibody-antigen binding, enzyme-substrate reaction, and nucleic acid hybridization) ensure the high selectivity for detection and enable the design of various signal amplification strategies for sensitive detection. Despite many advances in this field, it remains a challenge to further improve the analytical performance of biomedical sensors for enhancing their efficacy in IVD applications.
In the past years, nanomaterials have gained intense interest as sensing materials for the development of biomedical sensors with enhanced performance due to their unique and promising features. Specifically, when the sizes of materials are reduced into nanoscales (1-100 nm), the quantum confinement effect and extremely large specific surface area emerge. These two important effects and their unique interplay dominate the properties of materials. Consequently, nanomaterials exhibit a diverse spectrum of interesting physicochemical properties, e.g., electric, magnetic, optical, and catalytic activities, that are completely different from bulk materials. Such unique properties allow them to serve as novel signal transducers for the construction of biosensing probes and surfaces. More significantly, thanks to recent achievements in fundamental research on synthetic methodology of nanomaterials, it becomes feasible to tightly control the morphology, structure, and composition of nanomaterials at the atomic precision. Such precise control tightly tunes and substantially enhances the properties of nanomaterials, making it more effective to improve the analytical performance of biosensors. The resulting nano-biosensors are thus more promising for applications in IVDs.
The current Research Topic is therefore to highlight advanced nanomaterials with interesting properties as emerging sensing materials for the development of biosensors toward IVD applications. Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Design, synthesis, and characterization of novel nanomaterials with interesting properties that have promising potential in biomedical sensors;
• Design and development of novel nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors with enhanced analytical performance;
• Demonstration of new disease biomarkers using nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors;
• Emerging application of nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors in in vivo diagnostics;
• New mechanisms for the syntheses of advanced nanomaterials;
• New sensing principles for the construction of nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors.
• Both original research article and comprehensive review will be considered in this Research Topic.
In the past years, nanomaterials have gained intense interest as sensing materials for the development of biomedical sensors with enhanced performance due to their unique and promising features. Specifically, when the sizes of materials are reduced into nanoscales (1-100 nm), the quantum confinement effect and extremely large specific surface area emerge. These two important effects and their unique interplay dominate the properties of materials. Consequently, nanomaterials exhibit a diverse spectrum of interesting physicochemical properties, e.g., electric, magnetic, optical, and catalytic activities, that are completely different from bulk materials. Such unique properties allow them to serve as novel signal transducers for the construction of biosensing probes and surfaces. More significantly, thanks to recent achievements in fundamental research on synthetic methodology of nanomaterials, it becomes feasible to tightly control the morphology, structure, and composition of nanomaterials at the atomic precision. Such precise control tightly tunes and substantially enhances the properties of nanomaterials, making it more effective to improve the analytical performance of biosensors. The resulting nano-biosensors are thus more promising for applications in IVDs.
The current Research Topic is therefore to highlight advanced nanomaterials with interesting properties as emerging sensing materials for the development of biosensors toward IVD applications. Areas to be covered in this Research Topic may include, but are not limited to:
• Design, synthesis, and characterization of novel nanomaterials with interesting properties that have promising potential in biomedical sensors;
• Design and development of novel nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors with enhanced analytical performance;
• Demonstration of new disease biomarkers using nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors;
• Emerging application of nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors in in vivo diagnostics;
• New mechanisms for the syntheses of advanced nanomaterials;
• New sensing principles for the construction of nanomaterial-based biomedical sensors.
• Both original research article and comprehensive review will be considered in this Research Topic.
Keywords: nanomaterials, biosensors, biomarkers, in vitro diagnostics, physicochemical properties
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