Team:Michigan

Abstract

In the past year, paper-based transcription and translation, reconstituted from freeze-drying, have been adapted in a variety of ways and shown to be effective after a year of storage at room temperature. This system, when freeze-dried on paper, is cheap and portable, making it well suited to tackle the unmet needs for disease detection in remote areas. Equally important, toehold switches that can be adapted to virtually any trigger RNA have been optimized. While paper-based gene networks have been used to detect proteins, no generalizable detection strategy has been attempted. Aptapaper uses the targeting specificity of aptamers and the modularity of toehold switches to explore protein detection systems that can easily be adapted to any peptide target.