Aptamer-Based Detection of Caffeine and Theophylline Through Utilization of Gold Nanoparticles and Graphene Oxide

Abstract

The caffeine and theophylline aptamers were used in tandem with gold nanoparticles and graphene oxide to study potential methods for small molecule detection. The AuNP approach is a label-free approach, and the graphene oxide-based sensor is a fluorescence based approach. Each sensor is based off previous literature reporting sensors for DNA targets; more recent literature uses both methods for small molecule detection, but fails to consider target-nanomaterial interactions. The works presented in this thesis serve to determine whether such an interaction exists, and how it may affect the accuracy of the sensors.