Research Projects

Glutamate, one of those neurotransmitters is a non-essential amino acid with relatively high concentrations everywhere in the body. Other than glutamine uptake from food, it can also be produced from glucose through a metabolic pathway and high concentration of glutamate causes neurotoxicity and diseases of the nervous system. Basically, glutamate concentration increases with increasing glucose concentration as neurons become dependent on glucose for energy production and to use glutamate as a neurotransmitter. Therefore, abnormal level of glutamate concentration could indicate that something is wrong with glucose metabolism and this makes glutamate interesting to analyse for further investigation of neurological diseases as well as metabolic disorder. Monosodium glutamates have been used as a common ingredient in the various food products especially fast foods and Chinese foods. However, Indian’s Preventions of Food Adulteration sets a limiting value of 1% only. Sensitive and selective sensing of glutamate are not only relevant for use in clinical diagnosis but also in food industry, bio-processing and safety, drug discovery, environmental monitoring, fermentation monitoring, development of renewable, sustainable fuel cells etc. Both enzymatic and non-enzymatic electrochemical methods are considered to be the most effective because of their high sensitivity, convenience, speed, and low-cost. The enzymatic electrochemical sensors generally suffer with unavoidable problems like inefficiency of enzyme at the testing environmental conditions, e.g., temperature and pH value, poor stability and inactivity of the enzyme, poor charge transfer to the electrode surface, very poor long-term accuracy. Non-enzymatic electrochemical sensors through direct oxidation of biomolecules on electrode are clearly superior over the enzymatic one in terms high sensitivity, good stability, reproducibility, and strong anti-interference properties. Moving towards the fourth generation of designing electrochemical biosensors, without using enzymes might improve the stability, sensitivity, selectivity reliability etc. and decrease the cost. Here, the electro active polymers have been used selectively. Thought the electroactive polymer should have great prospect due to their easy and unique redox property. We have introduced the polyphenylenediamine polymer with having novel structure and functionality. Recently, we have also reported the successful preparation of uniformly distributed poly(o-phenylenediamine)/silver core-shell nanocomposite. There for the project aims to develop non-enzymatic sensitive glutamate sensory system with high selectivity and sensitivity for the potential significance application for use in clinical diagnosis, food industry, bio-processing and safety, drug discovery, environmental monitoring, fermentation monitoring, development of renewable, sustainable fuel cells etc.