Publications by authors named "Jin Ha Choi"

Exosomes, crucial for intercellular communication, hold potential as noninvasive liquid biopsy biomarkers especially in early breast cancer detection benefitted from the distinctive "cancer signature" on their membrane surface. Yet, the present methodologies of exosomes for breast cancer detection have involved the implementation of only a single member from the tetraspanin protein group as a biomarker. Moreso, due to the high concentration of exosomes in complex body fluids, there is a compelling need to measure a small concentration of cancer-derived exosomes with a low background noise signal.

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The human neurovascular system is a complex network of blood vessels and brain cells that is essential to the proper functioning of the brain. In recent years, researchers have become increasingly interested in the role of this system in developing drugs to treat neuroinflammation. This process is believed to contribute to the development of several neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

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Article Synopsis
  • The growing aging population necessitates better diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs), and two-dimensional (2D) materials present significant advantages for this purpose.
  • 2D materials enhance the development of biosensors for early NDD detection, targeted drug delivery systems that cross the blood-brain barrier, and support cell growth in tissue engineering to restore neural functions.
  • Overall, the use of 2D materials in NDD research holds the potential to improve patient care and quality of life for an increasingly aging demographic.
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  • * LFAs utilize advanced nanomaterial-based optical sensing technologies for quick and effective detection of viral proteins, requiring less training and infrastructure compared to conventional techniques.
  • * Despite progress in the development of LFAs, challenges remain in creating systems that are simple, stable, highly sensitive, and selective, with the potential to improve clinical diagnostics and environmental monitoring significantly.
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In the context of virus outbreaks, the need for early and accurate diagnosis has become increasingly urgent. In addition to being crucial for effective disease control, timely and precise detection of viral infections is also necessary for the implementation of essential public health measures, especially during pandemics. Among these measures, point-of-care testing (POCT) stands out as a powerful approach with the potential to revolutionize the landscape of viral diagnosis.

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  • - Biohybrid robots are being developed for various applications but currently lack a central nervous system, limiting their use in neurodegenerative disease research.
  • - A new biohybrid robot-on-a-chip model has been introduced that integrates a brain organoid, motor neuron spheroids, and muscle bundles to assess drug impacts on neurodegenerative diseases for the first time.
  • - The model effectively measures the effect of levodopa on muscle movement, showing significant improvements in activity in a Parkinson's disease model, suggesting its potential as a standard for drug evaluation.
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Neurotransmitters are chemical compounds released by nerve cells, including neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes, that play an essential role in the transmission of signals in living organisms, particularly in the central nervous system, and they also perform roles in realizing the function and maintaining the state of each organ in the body. The dysregulation of neurotransmitters can cause neurological disorders. This highlights the significance of precise neurotransmitter monitoring to allow early diagnosis and treatment.

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  • Microcystis aeruginosa (M. aeruginosa) contributes to the eutrophication of aquatic environments, necessitating effective measurement and control methods.
  • A new field-ready device combining a cyanobacterial pretreatment system with an electrochemical CRISPR biosensor was developed to detect M. aeruginosa gene fragments in freshwater samples.
  • The biosensor achieved a high detection sensitivity of 0.089 pg/μl and demonstrated effective performance in selectivity and matrix tests, making it suitable for on-site detection of harmful algal blooms (CyanoHABs).
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Hydrogen peroxide (HO) has been a fascinating target in various chemical, biological, clinical, and industrial fields. Several types of fluorescent protein-stabilized gold nanoclusters (protein-AuNCs) have been developed for sensitive and easy detection of HO. However, its low sensitivity makes is difficult to measure negligible concentrations of HO.

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Proteolytic enzymes are one of the important biomarkers that enable the early diagnosis of several diseases, such as cancers. A specific proteolytic enzyme selectively degrades a certain sequence of a polypeptide. Therefore, a particular proteolytic enzyme can be selectively quantified by changing detectable signals causing degradation of the peptide chain.

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Recently, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the need for early diagnosis of infectious diseases, including viruses, is emerging. Though early diagnosis is essential to prevent infection and progression to severe illness, there are few technologies that accurately measure low concentrations of biomarkers. Plasmonic nanomaterials are attracting materials that can effectively amplify various signals, including fluorescence, Raman, and other optical and electromagnetic output.

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There have been several trials to develop the bioactuator using skeletal muscle cells for controllable biobybird robot. However, due to the weak contraction force of muscle cells, the muscle cells could not be used for practical applications such as biorobotic hand for carrying objects, and actuator of biohybrid robot for toxicity test and drug screening. Based on reported hyaluronic acid-modified gold nanoparticles (HA@GNPs)-embedded muscle bundle on PDMS substrate, in this study for augmented actuation, we developed the electroactive nano-biohybrid actuator composed of the HA@GNP-embedded muscle bundle and molybdenum disulfide nanosheet (MoS NS)-modified electrode to enhance the motion performance.

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The detection of nucleic acids and their mutation derivatives is vital for biomedical science and applications. Although many nucleic acid biosensors have been developed, they often require pretreatment processes, such as target amplification and tagging probes to nucleic acids. Moreover, current biosensors typically cannot detect sequence-specific mutations in the targeted nucleic acids.

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Biohybrid robots, which comprise soft materials with biological components, have the potential to sense, respond, and adapt to changing environmental loads dynamically. Instead of humans and other living things, biohybrid robots can be used in various fields such as drug screening and toxicity assessment. In the actuation part, however, since a muscle cell-based biohybrid robot is limited in that the driving force is weak, it is difficult to evaluate drug and toxicological effects by distinguishing changes in the biohybrid robot's motion.

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Article Synopsis
  • * Plasmonic nanoparticles are being developed to improve RNAi therapeutics through efficient delivery, photothermal properties, and better detection for cancer.
  • * The review outlines recent advancements in using plasmonic nanoparticles for miRNA delivery, while discussing challenges and future prospects in RNAi-based cancer diagnosis and treatment.
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Recently, more and more attention has been paid to the development of eco-friendly solid sorbents that are cost-effective, noncorrosive, have a high gas capacity, and have low renewable energy for CO capture. Here, we claimed the fabrication of a three-dimensional (3D) film of hollow nanocones with a large surface area (949.5 m/g), a large contact angle of 136.

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Microfluidic-based biosensors have been developed for their precise automatic reaction control. However, these biosensors require external devices that are difficult to transport and use. To overcome this disadvantage, our group made an easy-to-use, cheap, and light pumpless three-dimensional photo paper-based microfluidic analytical device (3D-μPAD; weight: 1.

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Nucleic acids, including DNA and RNA, have received prodigious attention as potential biomarkers for precise and early diagnosis of cancers. However, due to their small quantity and instability in body fluids, precise and sensitive detection is highly important. Taking advantage of the ease-to-functionality and plasmonic effect of nanomaterials, fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) and metal-enhanced fluorescence (MEF)-based biosensors have been developed for accurate and sensitive quantitation of cancer-related nucleic acids.

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Nucleic acid biomarkers have been widely used to detect various viral-associated diseases, including the recent pandemic COVID-19. The CRISPR-Cas-based trans-activating phenomenon has shown excellent potential for developing sensitive and selective detection of nucleic acids. However, the nucleic acid amplification steps are typically required when sensitive and selective monitoring of the target nucleic acid is needed.

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Detecting circulating tumor cells (CTCs) has been considered one of the best biomarkers in liquid biopsy for early diagnosis and prognosis monitoring in cancer. A major challenge of using CTCs is detecting extremely low-concentrated targets in the presence of high noise factors such as serum and hematopoietic cells. This review provides a selective overview of the recent progress in the design of microfluidic devices with optical sensing tools and their application in the detection and analysis of CTCs and their small malignant subset, circulating cancer stem cells (CCSCs).

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Metastasis is the primary cause of a large number of cancer-associated deaths. By portraying the precise environment of the metastasis process , the microfluidic system provides useful insights on the mechanisms underlying cancer cell migration, invasion, colonization, and the procurement of supplemental nutrients. However, current metastasis models are biased in studying blood vessel-based metastasis pathways and thus the understanding of lymphatic metastasis is limited which is also closely related to the inflammatory system.

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Cell-free DNA (cfDNA) has attracted significant attention due to its high potential to diagnose diseases, such as cancer. Still, its detection by amplification method has limitations because of false-positive signals and difficulty in designing target-specific primers. CRISPR-Cas-based fluorescent biosensors have been developed but also need the amplification step for the detection.

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In this study, an electrochemical biosensor composed of a horseradish peroxidase (HRP)-encapsulated protein nanoparticles (HEPNP) was fabricated for the sensitive and selective detection of HO. The HEPNP has a three-dimensional structure that can contain a large amount of HRP; therefore, HEPNP can amplify the electrochemical signals necessary for the detection of HO. Furthermore, reduced graphene oxide (rGO) was used to increase the efficiency of electron transfer from the HEPNP to an electrode, which could enhance the electrochemical signal.

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quantitative measurements of neurotransmitter activities can provide useful insights into the underlying mechanisms of stem cell differentiation, the formation of neuronal networks, and neurodegenerative diseases. Currently, neurotransmitter detection methods suffer from poor spatial resolution, nonspecific detection, and a lack of analysis. To address this challenge, herein, we first developed a graphene oxide (GO)-hybrid nanosurface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) array to detect dopamine (DA) in a selective and sensitive manner.

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Recently, extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their contents have been revealed to play crucial roles in the intrinsic intercellular communications and have received extensive attention as next-generation biomarkers for diagnosis of diseases such as cancers. However, due to the structural nature of the EVs, the precise isolation and characterization are extremely challenging. To this end, tremendous efforts have been made to develop bionano sensors for the precise and sensitive characterization of EVs from a complex biologic fluid.

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