Editorial Cite This: ACS Sens. 2018, 3, 2198−2199
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Remembering Some of the Giants of Biosensing
ACS Sens. 2018.3:2198-2199. Downloaded from pubs.acs.org by 178.159.97.18 on 11/29/18. For personal use only.
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Beyond enzyme electrodes, there are other giants that we should remember. Taking 1994 as the frame of referenceas that is the year I entered the biosensing fieldwhen someone mentioned microbial biosensors, I always thought of Isao Karube and a host of papers in the mid-1970s. If you talked about ion selective field effect transistors for biosensing something that is still a very hot topic todayI would think of Piet Bergveld and his 1970 paper.4 Switching gears to affinity sensors, an immunoassay of course traces back to the radioimmunoassay, and Yalow and Berson in 1959.5 Surface plasmon resonance-based biosensors has become one of the really popular approaches for label free immunosensors, and makes me think of Pharmacia and their collaborations with Linkoping University to produce the paper from Bo Liedberg and co-workers in 1983.6 For electrochemical immunosensors, the paper that springs to mind for me is the 1975 JACS paper by Jiri Janata given the simple one word title “Immunoelectrode”.7 Many of these developments would also be preceded by the lateral flow devicea device with ever increasing popularity both in research papers and in commercial technologieswhich draw their lineage from Plotz and Singer in 1956.8 With regard to DNA electrochemistryanother particularly popular topic todayI would think of Emil Paleček and his 19609 paper in Nature. For electrochemical DNA hybridization biosensors, though, I tend to think of Susan Mikkelsen’s 1993 paper in Analytical Chemistry.10 There was also intense research interest at this time in DNA sensing with the rise of the gene chips. There are of course many other giants of biosensing from that time, and since, who have made seminal contributions that I have not mentioned. This was a snapshot of just a few that jumped out at me when I first entered the field, and sought to learn what had been done. They are mostly electrochemical, as electrochemistry seemed to dominate biosensors in the early days, but now many of the new concepts are optical. The incredible volume of literature published these days, and the fact that it is now 25 years since my beginnings in the biosensor field, means that it is much easier to overlook these giants; we should not of course, as they built the base for this very important field. For those of you who are interested, many of the seminal developments in the early days are captured in one monograph entitled Biosensors: Fundamentals and Applications, published by Oxford University Press in 1986, and edited by three giants: Tony Turner, Isao Karube, and George Wilson.11 Reading that and related works may help some of us avoid reinventing what is already well established. And maybe we will put our own work in the context of, not just the recent literature, but also the legacy literature.
ecently I have been thinking about the famous Isaac Newton quote “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” As scientists we like to think of this quote in terms of what we are discovering now, because it is a consequence of all the great science that has come before us. The first research I did was related to Förster resonance energy transfer in Langmuir−Blodgett (LB) films. At the time I went to the bowels of the library at Melbourne University, and tracked down the original papers to read them. I remember bits of both the Förster paper and the first LB film paper even today. In my memory, the Förster paper had an excerpt in it about the moment he had an epiphany in relation to the energy transfer mechanism while looking out the window at leaves on a tree. What struck me was the reflective writing style, which is seldom part of scientific writing today. What I recalled from the LB paper was that the LB trough was wax, and the barrier was made with a string that was coated in wax. For me, as a student, this really opened my eyes. It made me realize how much good science could be done with minimal resources and great ideas. And also how good we have it now. Two things made me think about the Newton quote and, in particular, the giants of biosensing. The first was the July editorial in ACS Energy Letters (DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.8b00792), written by Prashant Kamat, on the unsung heroes of energy research. The second was the sudden proliferation of tables of comparative studies in research papers. Such tables can be incredibly useful in comprehensive reviews, but I feel they are of dubious utility in a primary research paper. I feel this because they are usually not comprehensive, and I always find myself wondering whether the entries were selected without bias, or were they selected with a view to showing the benefits of the new research being reported. What is frequently the case with these tables is that only recent papers are chosen. For example, I saw one the other day where a reference to the performance of glucose sensors included an enzyme electrode example from 2016, with performance parameters I know were not the state of the art when the original mediated glucose oxidase enzyme electrode paper was published in 1984.1 So, what are some of the seminal papers in biosensing that are sometimes forgotten? Who are the giants upon whose shoulders we are now standing? The birth of the biosensor field is often associated with the coining of the term “enzyme electrode” in 19622 by Leland Clark Jr. and Champ Lyons, who published a paper on a Clark oxygen electrode modified with an enzyme layer. With this revolutionary idea, new concepts started to be published at a rapid rate. In 1969, Guilbault and Montalvo3 extend the idea of the enzyme electrode beyond amperometry to potentiometry with a urease enzyme, coupled to a pH electrode, to detect urea. And then in 1984, the paper on the mediated enzyme electrode was published by Cass et al.which then gave rise to the MediSense ExacTech glucose meterwith an author list that contains several of the giants of biosensing. © 2018 American Chemical Society
Received: November 2, 2018 Published: November 26, 2018 2198
DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.8b01344 ACS Sens. 2018, 3, 2198−2199
ACS Sensors
Editorial
J. Justin Gooding, Editor-in-Chief
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The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
J. Justin Gooding: 0000-0002-5398-0597 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Cass, A. E. G.; Davis, G.; Francis, G. D.; Hill, H. A. O.; Aston, W. J.; Higgins, I. J.; Plotkin, E. J.; Scott, D. L.; Turner, A. P. F. Ferrocene-Mediated Enzyme Electrode for Amperometric Detection of Glucose. Anal. Chem. 1984, 56, 667−671. (2) Clark, L. C.; Lyons, C. Electrode Systems for Continuous Monitoring in Cardiovascular Surgery. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1962, 102 (1), 29. (3) Guilbault, G. G.; Montalvo, J. G. A Urea-Specific Enzyme Electrode. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1969, 91 (8), 2164. (4) Bergveld, P. Development of an Ion-Sensitive Solid-State Device for Neurophysiological Measurements. IEEE Trans. Biomed. Eng. 1970, BM17 (1), 70. (5) Yalow, R. S.; Berson, S. A. Assay of Plasma Insulin in Human Subjects by Immunological Methods. Nature 1959, 184 (4699), 1648−1649. (6) Liedberg, B.; Nylander, C.; Lundstrom, I. Surface-Plasmon Resonance for Gas-Detection and Biosensing. Sens. Actuators 1983, 4 (2), 299−304. (7) Janata, J. Immunoelectrode. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1975, 97 (10), 2914−2916. (8) Singer, J. M.; Plotz, C. M. Latex Fixation Test 0.1. Application to the Serologic Diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis. Am. J. Med. 1956, 21 (6), 888−892. (9) Palecek, E. Oscillographic Polarography of Highly Polymerized Deoxyribonucleic Acid. Nature 1960, 188 (4751), 656−657. (10) Millan, K. M.; Mikkelsen, S. R. Sequence-Selective Biosensor for Dna-Based on Electroactive Hybridization Indicators. Anal. Chem. 1993, 65 (17), 2317−2323. (11) Biosensors: Fundamentals and Applications; Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1987.
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DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.8b01344 ACS Sens. 2018, 3, 2198−2199
