Highly Sensitive Ammonia Sensor with Organic Vertical Nanojunctions for Noninvasive Detection of Hepatic Injury

Abstract

We successfully demonstrate the first solid-state sensor to have reliable responses to breath ammonia of rat. For thioacetamide (TAA)-induced hepatopathy rats, we observe that the proposed sensor can detect liver that undergoes acute-moderate hepatopathy with a p-value less than 0.05. The proposed sensor is an organic diode with vertical nanojunctions produced by using low-cost colloidal lithography. Its simple structure and low production cost facilitates the development of point-of-care technology. We also anticipate that the study is a starting point for investigating sophisticated breath-ammonia-related disease models.

Selective sensing of NH 3 by Si-doped α-MoO 3 for breath analysis

“…NH 3 is a promising breath marker for the detection of kidney [5] and liver diseases. [6] More specifically, mouth-exhaled breath NH 3 levels were identified to be around 400 -1800 ppb (mean 960) for healthy people and elevated to 820 -14700 ppb (mean 4880) for ESRD patients, [5] a trend consistent with other studies. [4,7,8] Furthermore, breath NH 3 has been proposed as indicator to removal of blood urea nitrogen (BUN) since its concentration follows the BUN kinetics during dialysis treatment.…”

“…Sensing films were formed by direct deposition [35] of the product nanoparticles for 4 min onto a 15 mm x 13 mm x 0.8 mm water-cooled Al 2 O 3 sensor substrate (Electronic Design M a n u s c r i p t 6 Center, Case Western Reserve University, USA) 20 cm above the FSP nozzle. Nanoparticles that were not deposited onto the substrate were collected onto a water-cooled glass-fiber filter (GF6 Albet-Hahnemuehle, 257 mm diameter) 50 cm above the nozzle with a vacuum pump.…”

Gas‐Sensing Performance and Operation Mechanism of Organic π‐Conjugated Materials

“…Along with the development of OFET devices, the exploration and synthesis of new πconjugated materials provide a large material library for the application in the organic gas sensors, from dyes and pigments such as metal phthalocyanines, [19][20][21][22][23][24][25] perylene derivatives [26][27][28][29][30] to thiophene and conjugated polymer such as P3HT, diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) derivatives ( Figure 1). [15,16,[31][32][33][34][35][36] Table 1 summarized the sensor performance of several typical materials reported, from phthalocyanine, pentacene, polythiophene to DPP derivatives that operated at room temperature. The involved analytes include oxidative gases (such as NO 2 , NO, O 2 , Cl 2 ) and reductive gas (NH 3 , H 2 S, CO, H 2 ).…”

Surface Regulation Towards Stimuli‐Responsive Luminescence of Ultrasmall Thiolated Gold Nanoparticles for Ratiometric Imaging

“…With the help of surface ligands, a set of diverse electron‐rich molecules containing amino groups such as peptides/proteins, amino acids, and DNA in the biological systems, could be tethered to the surface of AuNPs for biological functions. [4a] Moreover, the typical electron‐rich amines also served as important biomarkers for diseases, and indicators for food spoilage . Elucidation of the amine‐based molecular binding and related stimuli‐responsive emissions at the ultrasmall gold surface is currently unexploited, but of immense importance.…”