Doctoral Research Scholarship is Available

Project Titile: 

Aptameric detection and screening of pathogens and biotoxins

Project Description

Improved pathogen detection and screening systems are urgently needed to control the alarming escalation of infectious disease cases and associated deaths in Malaysia and globally. Improved detection will promote early treatment and/or isolation of infected patients or materials such as food, water and human samples. Current standard methods for detecting pathogens rely on time-consuming, non-specific, and/or expensive processes which are typically unsuitable for real-time mass evaluation exercises especially in low-resource communities where most infectious diseases are endemic.

This research programme seeks to develop a platform that will investigate, characterise and harness the binding mechanism of nucleic acid aptamers of pathogenic species on structured polymer monoliths for the development of a new and improved technology for real-time accurate detection and screening of pathogens and biotoxins. Nucleic acid aptamers are short, single-stranded RNA or DNA sequences that can selectively bind to specific cellular and biomolecular targets, with the capacity to probe a pathogenic target when bound to its membrane receptors. The application of a structured polymer monolith as the synthetic base will provide the needed convective mass transport for rapid screening. The biosensing technology espoused in this project is versatile and transferable to pathogens different infectious diseases, thus creating a wide scope for intellectual property marketing. 

 Scholarship provision for this project is for both tuition and stipend. Interested candidates should contact:

Professor Michael K. Danquah
Associate Professor | Department of Chemical & Petroleum Engineering
Associate Dean (Research & Development) | School of Engineering and Science
Curtin University, Sarawak Malaysia
Tel | +60 85 443 821 (GMT+8)
Fax | +60 85 443 837  
Email | mkdanquah@curtin.edu.my
Web | www.curtin.edu.my