Antimicrobial Peptides as Probes in Biosensors Detecting Whole Bacteria: A Review

Abstract

Bacterial resistance is becoming a global issue due to its rapid growth. Potential new drugs as antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are considered for several decades as promising candidates to circumvent this threat. Nonetheless, AMPs have also been used more recently in other settings such as molecular probes grafted on biosensors able to detect whole bacteria. Rapid, reliable and cost-efficient diagnostic tools for bacterial infection could prevent the spread of the pathogen from the earliest stages. Biosensors based on AMPs would enable easy monitoring of potentially infected samples, thanks to their powerful versatility and integrability in pre-existent settings. AMPs, which show a broad spectrum of interactions with bacterial membranes, can be tailored in order to design ubiquitous biosensors easily adaptable to clinical settings. This review aims to focus on the state of the art of AMPs used as the recognition elements of whole bacteria in label-free biosensors with a particular focus on the characteristics obtained in terms of threshold, volume of sample analysable and medium, in order to assess their workability in real-world applications.

Antimicrobial Peptides: A Potent Alternative to Antibiotics

“…The ability of AMPs to sense bacterial presence in potentially infected clinical samples is a major advantage. As already reviewed by Pardoux et al, AMPs could serve as infection selective tracers where they act as probes in biosensors and thus detect pathogens [99]. This is due to the preferential binding of AMPs along with their great number allowing the coverage of a wide range of microorganisms.…”

Environmental Management of Legionella in Domestic Water Systems: Consolidated and Innovative Approaches for Disinfection Methods and Risk Assessment

“…The antimicrobial peptide (AMP)-based biosensors, for example, introduced rapid, reliable, and cost-efficient tools for the direct recognition of floating bacteria in contaminated water [ 155 ]. The “watersampling” chip has shown to be able to reveal viable pathogens in water by the real-time electrical detection of their interactions with anchored AMP, reaching a Limit of detection (LoD) of 1 cell/µL [ 156 ], which is promising towards the VBNCs detection.…”

Colorimetric Aptasensor for Detecting Bacillus carboniphilus Using Aptamer Isolated with a Non-SELEX-Based Method

“…They have mainly been studied for therapeutic uses or antibacterial applications, such as antifouling [11][12][13]. Recently, AMPs have been used as ligands in biosensors to detect whole-cell bacteria because of their broad-spectrum specificity [14,15]. A microarray chip coupled with multiple AMPs was designed for surface plasmon resonance imaging (SPRI) by Pardoux et al, in which pathogens can be detected using this multiplexing AMP array within 20 h [16].…”