National Invention Patent: An Electrochemical DNA Biosensor for Rapid Detection of eDNA in Crown-of-thorns Starfish
Recently, the national invention patent: an electrochemical DNA sensor for rapid detection of environmental DNA of the crown-of-thorns starfish (Patent No. 202111637977.0), which was applied for by Associate Professor Liwei Wang and others in our institute, has been authorized.
Crown-of-thorns starfish is a natural enemy of corals, and its repeated outbreaks are the main cause of coral reef degradation in the Indo-Pacific region. For example, the decline of living coral cover on Australia's Great Barrier Reef between 1985 and 2012 was mainly caused by longspur starfish outbreaks (42% of the corals died from predation by crown-of-thorns starfish). Crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks can cause great damage to the physical and biological structure of coral reefs, severely weakening the ecological function of coral reef ecosystems. Traditional monitoring techniques cannot achieve large-scale and high-frequency monitoring and warning and cannot accurately recognize the early signals of crown-of-thorns starfish.
This invention patent reports a DNA electrochemical biosensor based on the assembly of MoO2/C NF with specific DNA probes, and applied for the field, real-time and dynamic monitoring of eDNA in crown-of-thorns starfish. The biosensor had a low detection limit (LOD = 0.147 ng/μL) and exhibited excellent specificity and selectivity. The results of the sea trial showed that the sensor successfully detected the eDNA of crown-of-thorns starfish, and its analytical results were highly consistent with the results of the underwater ecological survey, indicating that the biosensor had good reliability with the value of identifying the crown-of-thorns starfish, which can meet the needs of the field monitoring of the crown-of-thorns starfish before the outbreak of the outbreak accurately. Therefore, this patent provides a new technology for reliable tracing of crown-of-thorns starfish, as well as a strong technical support for realizing the early warning and biological control of crown-of-thorns starfish on a regional scale, which fills the gap in the international research on the detection of crown-of-thorns starfish using electrochemical sensors.
Meanwhile, the research paper corresponding to the patent of the invention was also published in the top journal: Biosensors and Bioelectronics, 2023, 230, 115265. DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2023.115265.
