Nanosensor Cartridge for Bioagent Detection within Geospatial Networked Motes

Detection of biological warfare agents in a real-world setting is an increasingly urgent problem. Many of the current state-of-the-art sensors are aqueous based and require large biomolecules, such as antibodies, to achieve binding of the target molecule and subsequent reporting of the binding event. These technical hurdles are a drawback when considering deployment of these technologies to a battlefield situation. Here, we propose a sensor that is based on short peptide sequences that act as ligands for the target(s) of interest. Due to their small size, these ligands are not susceptible to conformational instability and the sensors should have a long lifetime even when deployed. Additionally, the sensor incorporates an exponential amplification of the output signal when the target of interest binds, effectively eliminating the background and false positive results.