Atomic-Level Engineering of Synthetic Receptors for Enhanced Virus Detection and Removal

Virus sensing and removal are critical for public health, particularly in preventing the spread of infectious diseases and ensuring safe water, air, and clinical environments. Current virus detection tools utilize recognition elements suffering from high cost, low stability, and specificity, and time-consuming production methods. Meanwhile, conventional virus removal techniques are often hindered by inefficiency, complexity, and the potential for harmful byproducts. Herein, this study successfully addressed these challenges by employing extensive computational techniques to design and optimize epitope-specific novel artificial ligands for virus detection and removal, utilized in two major applications: biosensing and membrane filtration. Virus-specific, computationally designed imprinted receptors (CIRs) functionalized on quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) platforms, developed in this work, allow human pathogenic virus detection with high sensitivity (limit of detection = 0.064 fM) in complex media such as tap water and human serum, while providing high selectivity and specificity. Moreover, CIR integrated polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) and polyethersulfone (PES) membranes resulted in an efficient virus removal from contaminated water with a 100% purification rate. This synergistic approach highlights the potential of computationally derived imprinted synthetic ligands in advancing point-of-care diagnostics and water treatment technologies for virus sensing and removal.