Congratulations to Vuslat Buk who won the Tyndall Postgraduate Research Publication of the Year for her paper entitled “Fabrication and evaluation of a carbon quantum dot/gold nanoparticle nanohybrid material integrated onto planar micro gold electrodes for potential bioelectrochemical sensing applications”.
Vuslat’s paper demonstrates the operation of an electrochemical biosensor which was constructed by attaching a combination of gold nanoparticles and carbon quantum dots to an electrode surface, where this hybrid nanomaterial was able to act as a very efficient electrochemical support material onto which various chemical receptors could be adsorbed. In particular, the enzyme glucose oxidase was immobilised at the electrode surface such that the electrode then demonstrated very high sensitivity towards the detection of glucose itself.
Although there are many types of glucose sensor available at the present time, Vuslat describes the first use of a hybrid nanomaterial for this application and shows that enhanced sensitivity is achieved in comparison with other available sensors while also showing very robust responses in the face of various potential interfering species.
The paper also describes how the hybrid nanomaterial was formed and how the electrodes were fabricated – using standard semiconductor fabrication methods. Finally, the biosensor was demonstrated to be very effective in terms of real-world applications via the detection of glucose in sterile human serum samples.
Vuslat graduated as a chemist from Ankara University, Turkey where she also received her M.Sc. in nanobioelectrochemistry. At the moment she is a final year PhD student in Life Science Interface at Tyndall and UCC’s Department of Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Martyn Pemble. Vuslat was presented with her award by Dr Frank Smyth, CEO, Pilot Photonics, who are the award sponsors.
Her winning paper was co-authored by Martyn Pemble and Karen Twomey, and published at Electrochimica Acta 293, pp 307-317, 10 January 2019 (accepted 7 October 2018, available online 9 October 2018) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electacta.2018.10.038
Congratulations also to the runners up:
- Niamh Kavanagh et al., “Stable injection locking with slotted Fabry–Perot lasers at 2μm”, 2019 J. Phys. Photonics 1 015005 (accepted 5 October 2018, published online 6 December 2018)
- Ludovic Caro et al., “An Integration-Friendly Regrowth-Free Tunable Laser" IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 270-272, 1 Feb.1, 2018.
- Marcelo Saito Nogueira et al. “Diffuse reflectance spectroscopy for determination of optical properties and chromophore concentrations of mice internal organs in the range of 350 nm to 1860 nm”, Proc. SPIE 10685, Biophotonics: Photonic Solutions for Better Health Care VI, 106853G (17 May 2018).
The winner and runners up are now nominated for the UCC Science, Engineering and Food Science Postgraduate Research Publication of the Year award.