Conformational-switch biosensors as novel tools to support continuous, real-time molecular monitoring in lab-on-a-chip devices

Recent years have seen continued expansion of the functionality of lab on a chip (LOC) devices. Indeed LOCs now provide scientists and developers with useful and versatile platforms across a myriad of chemical and biological applications. The field still fails, however, to integrate an often important element of bench-top analytics: real-time molecular measurements that can be used to "guide" a chemical response. Here we describe the analytical techniques that could provide LOCs with such real-time molecular monitoring capabilities. It appears to us that, among the approaches that are general ( i.e. , that are independent of the reactive or optical properties of their targets), sensing strategies relying on binding-induced conformational change of bioreceptors are most likely to succeed in such applications. We argue that the introduction of high-frequency, real-time biosensors into LoCs could be used to establish high-value feed-back control functionalities.