Accurate and Sensitive Detection of Pathogenic Bacteria Living in Wastewater via Aptamer-Loaded GFET for Sewage Treatment Analysis

A highly accurate and sensitive monitoring platform for wastewater is needed for the detection of wastewater borne pathogens. For the fabrication of an environmental monitoring platform, an aptamer-integrated graphene field-effect transistor (GFET) platform was presented. The detection of pathogenic bacteria living in wastewater is an excellent method for confirming water quality. Here, we developed a target-specific aptamer-loaded GFET for the verification of purified wastewater. Dual graphene channels were micropatterned on the substrate, and each channel was immobilized with an aptamer linked to a chemical linker compound. Pretreated sewage was screened with our newly developed platform, and the detection performance was 10¹ cfu mL^-1 for multidrug-resistant <i>Acinetobacter baumannii</i> and 10¹ cfu mL^-1 for methicillin-resistant <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i>, with a measurement range of 10¹ to 10⁶ cfu mL^-1. Additionally, in the presence of impurities, the platform showed a highly accurate binding affinity between the target and biomolecule without noise caused by interference effects.