Making good sense of nature's offerings
Biomimetic materials, developed using biological systems as models, afford a wide variety of uses and benefits, and continue to drive innovation by bringing together diverse research fields. Recent advances in the development of biomimetic ligands, which work by mimicking the biological binding site, have resulted in their being favoured over antibodies in many areas of biotechnology. However, the right choice of ligand for an intended structure or material composition is still subject to hits and misses. The 'Biomimetic sensors as new generation of biotechnological devices for food safety and quality monitoring' (Biomimic) project is working towards the development of a new generation of biomimetic sensors applicable to safety and quality monitoring of food. The EU-funded project is focused on validating the enhanced performance possibilities of computationally designed biomimetic ligands compared to enzymes or antibodies. This new direction offers a solution to the disadvantages of using biological materials and is in line with efforts to reduce the use of animals for production of biological reagents. Biomimic researchers are taking a molecular modelling approach to obtain candidates that will greatly reduce the efforts needed to obtain specific receptors. Much work has already been realised in this direction, with targets having been validated, selected and their interactions with receptors studied. Other work has centred on evaluating transduction technologies and approaches for biomimetic devices, evaluating affinity binding of biomimetic receptor-modified sensing channels on gold-based screen-printed electrodes, and arranging and testing tools needed for experiments. The project's approach has the potential to provide the means of producing cost-effective biotechnological devices for use in food safety and quality monitoring. Going forward, team members aim to realise an optimised protocol that will enable testing of all prior work on a real and typical food target.
