Electrochemical Hand-Held Biosensors for Biological Warfare Agents Assay

Abstract

Biological warfare agents are infectious microorganisms and toxins that have lethal potential for military use or terrorist activities. Early and reliable detection of the specific biological warfare agent at the sites of their use is one of the most important countermeasures; Ideal analytical devices should be hand-held size or pocket size if possible and should allow covering all scenarios and situations where a biological incident can occur. The current handheld analyzers have many limitations such as being too large, being overweight, or having low sensitivity to particular viruses, microorganisms, and toxins. Biosensors, analytical devices combining a simple physical sensor with a recognition part, would represent a platform for the assay of biological warfare agents allowing detection with high sensitivity typical for advanced laboratory instruments but also a simple design for building the biosensor into a pocket-sized analyzer. This review focuses on summarizing facts about the detection of biological warfare agents with hand-held devices based on electrochemical biosensors and the progress of electrochemical biosensors to assay agents. The actual literature is surveyed for this purpose, and actual trends in the assays of biological warfare agents are described.