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"... The team ... calls its creations 'tandem metabolic reaction-based sensors,' or TMR sensors for short. They work like miniature chemistry labs work to monitor metabolites. The sensors are built onto tiny electrodes made of extremely small single-wall carbon nanotubes. The scientists put enzymes and helper molecules that aid in chemical reactions, called cofactors, on to these electrodes. ..."
"Key takeaways
- A ... team has developed an advanced sensor platform that measures metabolites — key molecules involved in sustaining life through metabolism — inside the body in real time.
- By mimicking natural metabolic pathways and using biological molecular toolkits, the sensors can track thousands of metabolites, far beyond the small set detectable by traditional sensors, while simplifying the technology development process.
- This advance opens up new possibilities for diagnosing and managing disease, developing new drugs and unlocking deeper insights into how biological systems function.
... "
From the significance and abstract:
"Significance
This work presents a sensor design that harnesses naturally proven metabolic pathways and evolutionarily robust molecular toolkits (enzymes and cofactors) for reliable, real-time, and continuous in vivo monitoring of a vast majority of metabolites. The architecture is based on a multifunctional single-wall-carbon-nanotube electrode that supports tandem metabolic reactions linkable to oxidoreductase-based electrochemical analysis.
It robustly integrates cofactors and enzymes for metabolite intermediation, detection, and interference inactivation, while self-mediating these reactions at the limit of enzyme activity.
These tandem metabolic reaction–based sensors can catalyze the advancement of metabolomics from in vitro to in vivo settings, addressing missing context, real-time interaction, and high-resolution temporal dimensions in metabolomics-driven research and medical applications, such as microbiome studies and metabolic disorders.
Abstract
Mimicking metabolic pathways on electrodes enables in vivo metabolite monitoring for decoding metabolism. Conventional in vivo sensors cannot accommodate underlying complex reactions involving multiple enzymes and cofactors, addressing only a fraction of enzymatic reactions for few metabolites.
We devised a single-wall-carbon-nanotube-electrode architecture supporting tandem metabolic pathway–like reactions linkable to oxidoreductase-based electrochemical analysis, making a vast majority of metabolites detectable in vivo. This architecture robustly integrates cofactors, self-mediates reactions at maximum enzyme capacity, and facilitates metabolite intermediation/detection and interference inactivation through multifunctional enzymatic use. Accordingly, we developed sensors targeting 12 metabolites, with 100-fold-enhanced signal-to-noise ratio and days-long stability.
Leveraging these sensors, we monitored trace endogenous metabolites in sweat/saliva for noninvasive health monitoring, and a bacterial metabolite in the brain, marking a key milestone for unraveling gut microbiota–brain axis dynamics."
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