We like technology at the service of medicine and science, so we want to highlight that a new biosensor can detect Down syndrome, It is the birth defect with the highest presence in pregnancy and happens once for every 700 children born according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But now that this biosensor can detect Down syndrome Things could be very different, since it could have the ability to determine the existence of the problem in the DNA of the fetus only with the blood of the pregnant woman, even allowing to determine the degree of the defect.
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A biosensor can detect Down syndrome and we tell you how
According to the ACS Nano Letters magazine, Down syndrome is caused by the presence of an additional copy of chromosome 21 in the DNA chain, which until now are determinable through ultrasound and biomarker tests in the blood; although with high rates of misdiagnosis
Another procedure other than biosensor that can detect Down syndrome is amniocentesis, a much more invasive study since the doctor must insert a needle into the uterus to take a direct sample of amniotic fluid and it certainly has a much more specific diagnosis, but it is also a high risk procedure for life of the mother and her unborn child.
Third, there is the emerging method of sequencing the whole genome, which is very precise but its prices make it practically inaccessible for any patient, as is also extremely slow waiting for results.
Based on this background, members of the Nanodevice Physics and Chemistry Laboratory and the Department of Electronics at Peking University in China began work on developing a rapid, sensitive and cost-effective test that could detect high concentrations of DNA in the chromosome 21, but directly from the mother and not from the fetus.
To achieve the development of biosensor that can detect Down syndrome, The researchers used a series of field-effect transistor biosensors based on a single layer of molybdenum disulfide and attached gold nanoparticles to the surface.
Probe DNA sequences that can recognize a specific sequence of chromosome 21 were immobilized on these nanoparticles and once the biosensor can detect Down syndrome it causes a drop in the electrical current of the device and can find DNA concentrations as low as 0.1 fM / L, a much more sensitive rate than other field effect transistor DNA sensors that have been announced so far.
