A novel Love Wave biosensor for rapid and sensitive detection of marine toxins

Marine toxins are produced by plankton and do a great harm to human through food chain by accumulating in shellfishes and fishes. It is highly required and favorable to develop novel methods for the rapid and efficient detection of marine toxins to avoid the poisoning cases that have occurred frequently in many countries. This study presents a real-time Love Wave biosensor for the rapid detection of okadaic acid (OA), which used HepG2 cell lines as the sensing elements. The results indicate that this cell-based biosensor can provide real-time information of cellular activities induced by okadaic acid and has a higher sensitivity than the conventional cell-based assay. It is suggested that this cell-based biosensor can be used as a convenient and efficient method for marine toxin detection, which has a great potential to contribute to avoid the harmful effects of marine toxins on the human health.