Fabrication of liquid crystal droplets integrated hydrogel for biosensing applications

Abstract

The design and development of stable, simple, sensitive and quick responsive sensors have gained a great interest in biosensing. These sensors help in real-time detection of biologi cal compounds and therefore have compelling applications in bio-medical industry. Liquid crystals (LC) show properties innate to a perfect biosensor. In this project, we reported the biosensing applications of LC droplets integrated chitosan (CHI) hydrogel. CHI hy drogel stabilizes the LC droplets embedded between its polymer chains. The gelation of CHI hydrogel was fastened using Ag+ ions. The hydrogel stabilized LC droplets detected bovine serum albumin (BSA) in presence of a cationic surfactant cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB), by changing their configurations which was probed using polarizing opti cal microscopy (POM). We found the limit of detection (LOD) of BSA using this LC-based sensor system and also monitored the time dependent stability of the LC droplets embedded in hydrogel. From this, we could conclude that this sensor system offers a stable, label-free, highly selective and sensitive sensing platform for BSA.