Now showing 1 - 10 of 32
  • Publication
    Biotechnological processes in microbial amylase production
    ( 2017)
    Subash C. B. Gopinath
    ;
    Periasamy Anbu
    ;
    M. K. Md Arshad
    ;
    Thangavel Lakshmipriya
    ;
    ; ;
    Suresh V. Chinni
    Amylase is an important and indispensable enzyme that plays a pivotal role in the field of biotechnology. It is produced mainly from microbial sources and is used in many industries. Industrial sectors with top-down and bottom-up approaches are currently focusing on improving microbial amylase production levels by implementing bioengineering technologies. The further support of energy consumption studies, such as those on thermodynamics, pinch technology, and environment-friendly technologies, has hastened the large-scale production of the enzyme. Herein, the importance of microbial (bacteria and fungi) amylase is discussed along with its production methods from the laboratory to industrial scales.
  • Publication
    Preliminary studies on antimicrobial activity of extracts from aloe vera leaf, citrus hystrix leaf, zingiber officinale and Sabah snake grass against bacillus subtilis
    ( 2018)
    M.N.A. Uda
    ;
    ;
    Nur Hulwani Ibrahim
    ;
    ; ; ;
    Tan Ewe Shen
    ;
    Ong Yee Fen
    ;
    Maisara A. M. Akhir
    ;
    Herbal plants have several potential antimicrobial activities either as antifungal or antibacterial to fight against the disease and pathogen that attack the plants. The extractions of the Aloe vera leaf, Citrus hystrix leaf, Zingiber officinale rhizome and Sabah snake grass were selected in this study to fight against Bacillus subtilis. B. subtilis is a Gram-positive bacterium, rodshaped and catalase-positive that lives on decayed organic material. It is known as Gram-positive bacteria because of its thick peptidoglycan and would appear purple when subjected to Gram test. This species is commonly found in the upper layers of the soil, in meat or vegetables, in pastry, cooked meat, in bread or poultry products. The extracts of Sabah Snake Grass found to be most effective than A.vera leaf, Z. officinale, and C. hystrix against the B. subtilis.
  • Publication
    Effect of manganese content on the fabrication of porous anodic alumina
    ( 2012) ;
    M. N. Derman
    ;
    The influence of manganese content on the formation of well-ordered porous anodic alumina was studied. Porous anodic alumina has been produced on aluminium substrate of different manganese content by single-step anodizing at 50 V in 0.3 M oxalic acid at 15°C for 60 minutes. The well-ordered pore and cell structure was revealed by subjecting the porous anodic alumina to oxide dissolution treatment in a mixture of chromic acid and phosphoric acid. It was found that the manganese content above 1 wt% impaired the regularity of the cell and pore structure significantly, which can be attributed to the presence of secondary phases in the starting material with manganese content above 1 wt%. The pore diameter and interpore distance decreased with the addition of manganese into the substrates. The time variation of current density and the thickness of porous anodic alumina also decreased as a function of the manganese content in the substrates.
  • Publication
    Comparative reliability studies and analysis of Au, Pd-Coated Cu and Pd-Doped Cu Wire in microelectronics packaging
    ( 2013)
    Gan Chong Leong
    ;
    ;
    Vipul Bansal
    This paper compares and discusses the wearout reliability and analysis of Gold (Au), Palladium (Pd) coated Cu and Pd-doped Cu wires used in fineline Ball Grid Array (BGA) package. Intermetallic compound (IMC) thickness measurement has been carried out to estimate the coefficient of diffusion (D o ) under various aging conditions of different bonding wires. Wire pull and ball bond shear strengths have been analyzed and we found smaller variation in Pd-doped Cu wire compared to Au and Pd-doped Cu wire. Au bonds were identified to have faster IMC formation, compared to slower IMC growth of Cu. The obtained weibull slope, b of three bonding wires are greater than 1.0 and belong to wearout reliability data point. Pd-doped Cu wire exhibits larger time-to-failure and cycles-to-failure in both wearout reliability tests in Highly Accelerated Temperature and Humidity (HAST) and Temperature Cycling (TC) tests. This proves Pd-doped Cu wire has a greater potential and higher reliability margin compared to Au and Pd-coated Cu wires.
  • Publication
    Thickness dependent nanostructural, morphological, optical and impedometric analyses of Zinc Oxide-Gold hybrids : Nanoparticle to thin film
    ( 2015)
    Veeradasan Perumal
    ;
    ; ;
    R. Haarindraprasad
    ;
    ; ;
    S. R. Balakrishnan
    ;
    V. Thivina
    ;
    ;
    Yogendra Kumar Mishra
    The creation of an appropriate thin film is important for the development of novel sensing surfaces, which will ultimately enhance the properties and output of high-performance sensors. In this study, we have fabricated and characterized zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films on silicon substrates, which were hybridized with gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) to obtain ZnO-Au x (x = 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 nm) hybrid structures with different thicknesses. Nanoscale imaging by field emission scanning electron microscopy revealed increasing film uniformity and coverage with the Au deposition thickness. Transmission electron microscopy analysis indicated that the AuNPs exhibit an increasing average diameter (5–10 nm). The face center cubic Au were found to co-exist with wurtzite ZnO nanostructure. Atomic force microscopy observations revealed that as the Au content increased, the overall crystallite size increased, which was supported by X-ray diffraction measurements. The structural characterizations indicated that the Au on the ZnO crystal lattice exists without any impurities in a preferred orientation (002). When the ZnO thickness increased from 10 to 40 nm, transmittance and an optical bandgap value decreased. Interestingly, with 50 nm thickness, the band gap value was increased, which might be due to the Burstein-Moss effect. Photoluminescence studies revealed that the overall structural defect (green emission) improved significantly as the Au deposition increased. The impedance measurements shows an increasing value of impedance arc with increasing Au thicknesses (0 to 40 nm). In contrast, the 50 nm AuNP impedance arc shows an increased value compared to lower sputtering thicknesses, which indicated the presence of larger sized AuNPs that form a continuous film, and its ohmic characteristics changed to rectifying characteristics. This improved hybrid thin film (ZnO/Au) is suitable for a wide range of sensing applications.
  • Publication
    Fabrication of silicon nanowire sensors for highly sensitive pH and DNA hybridization detection
    ( 2022)
    Siti Fatimah Abd Rahman
    ;
    Nor Azah Yusof
    ;
    ; ; ;
    Mohd Nizar Hamidon
    A highly sensitive silicon nanowire (SiNW)-based sensor device was developed using electron beam lithography integrated with complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The top-down fabrication approach enables the rapid fabrication of device miniaturization with uniform and strictly controlled geometric and surface properties. This study demonstrates that SiNW devices are well-aligned with different widths and numbers for pH sensing. The device consists of a single nanowire with 60 nm width, exhibiting an ideal pH responsivity (18.26 × 106 Ω/pH), with a good linear relation between the electrical response and a pH level range of 4–10. The optimized SiNW device is employed to detect specific single-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (ssDNA) molecules. To use the sensing area, the sensor surface was chemically modified using (3-aminopropyl) triethoxysilane and glutaraldehyde, yielding covalently linked nanowire ssDNA adducts. Detection of hybridized DNA works by detecting the changes in the electrical current of the ssDNA-functionalized SiNW sensor, interacting with the targeted ssDNA in a label-free way. The developed biosensor shows selectivity for the complementary target ssDNA with linear detection ranging from 1.0 × 10−12 M to 1.0 × 10−7 M and an attained detection limit of 4.131 × 10−13 M. This indicates that the use of SiNW devices is a promising approach for the applications of ion detection and biomolecules sensing and could serve as a novel biosensor for future biomedical diagnosis.
  • Publication
    A portable automatic endpoint detection system for amplicons of loop mediated isothermal amplification on microfluidic compact disk platform
    ( 2015)
    Shah Uddin
    ;
    Fatimah Ibrahim
    ;
    Abkar Sayad
    ;
    Aung Thiha
    ;
    Koh Pei
    ;
    Mas Mohktar
    ;
    ;
    Jongman Cho
    ;
    Kwai Thong
    In recent years, many improvements have been made in foodborne pathogen detection methods to reduce the impact of food contamination. Several rapid methods have been developed with biosensor devices to improve the way of performing pathogen detection. This paper presents an automated endpoint detection system for amplicons generated by loop mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) on a microfluidic compact disk platform. The developed detection system utilizes a monochromatic ultraviolet (UV) emitter for excitation of fluorescent labeled LAMP amplicons and a color sensor to detect the emitted florescence from target. Then it processes the sensor output and displays the detection results on liquid crystal display (LCD). The sensitivity test has been performed with detection limit up to 2.5 × 10−3 ng/µL with different DNA concentrations of Salmonella bacteria. This system allows a rapid and automatic endpoint detection which could lead to the development of a point-of-care diagnosis device for foodborne pathogens detection in a resource-limited environment.
  • Publication
    Silica and graphene mediate arsenic detection in mature rice grain by a newly patterned current–volt aptasensor
    ( 2021)
    M. N. A. Uda
    ;
    ; ;
    N. H. Halim
    ;
    N. A. Parmin
    ;
    M. N. Afnan Uda
    ;
    ;
    Periasamy Anbu
    Arsenic is a major global threat to the ecosystem. Here we describe a highly accurate sensing platform using silica nanoparticles/graphene at the surface of aluminum interdigitated electrodes (Al IDE), able to detect trace amounts of arsenic(III) in rice grain samples. The morphology and electrical properties of fabricated Al IDEs were characterized and standardized using AFM, and SEM with EDX analyses. Micrometer scale Al IDEs were fabricated with silicon, aluminum, and oxygen as primary elements. Validation of the bare Al IDE with electrolyte fouling was performed at different pH levels. The sensing surface was stable with no electrolyte fouling at pH 7. Each chemical modification step was monitored with current–volt measurement. The surface chemical bonds were characterized by fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and revealed different peaks when interacting with arsenic (1600–1000 cm−1). Both silica nanoparticles and graphene presented a sensitive limit of detection as measured by slope calibration curves at 0.0000001 pg/ml, respectively. Further, linear regression was established using ΔI (A) = 3.86 E−09 log (Arsenic concentration) [g/ml] + 8.67 E−08 [A] for silica nanoparticles, whereas for graphene Y = 3.73 E−09 (Arsenic concentration) [g/ml] + 8.52 E−08 on the linear range of 0.0000001 pg/ml to 0.01 pg/ml. The R2 for silica (0.96) and that of graphene (0.94) was close to the maximum (1). Modification with silica nanoparticles was highly stable. The potential use of silica nanoparticles in the detection of arsenic in rice grain extract can be attributed to their size and stability.
  • Publication
    Titanium dioxide nanoparticle-based interdigitated electrodes: A novel current to voltage DNA biosensor recognizes E. coli O157:H7
    ( 2015)
    Sh. Nadzirah
    ;
    N. Azizah
    ;
    ; ;
    Mohd Kashif
    Nanoparticle-mediated bio-sensing promoted the development of novel sensors in the front of medical diagnosis. In the present study, we have generated and examined the potential of titanium dioxide (TiO 2) crystalline nanoparticles with aluminium interdigitated electrode biosensor to specifically detect single-stranded E.coli O157:H7 DNA. The performance of this novel DNA biosensor was measured the electrical current response using a picoam-meter. The sensor surface was chemically functionalized with (3-aminopropyl) triethoxysi-lane (APTES) to provide contact between the organic and inorganic surfaces of a single-stranded DNA probe and TiO 2 nanoparticles while maintaining the sensing system’s physi-cal characteristics. The complement of the target DNA of E. coli O157:H7 to the carboxyl-ate-probe DNA could be translated into electrical signals and confirmed by the increased conductivity in the current-to-voltage curves. The specificity experiments indicate that the biosensor can discriminate between the complementary sequences from the base-mis-matched and the non-complementary sequences. After duplex formation, the complemen-tary target sequence can be quantified over a wide range with a detection limit of 1.0 x 10 -13 M. With target DNA from the lysed E. coli O157:H7, we could attain similar sensitivity. Sta-bility of DNA immobilized surface was calculated with the relative standard deviation (4.6%), displayed the retaining with 99% of its original response current until 6 months. This high-performance interdigitated DNA biosensor with high sensitivity, stability and non-foul-ing on a novel sensing platform is suitable for a wide range of biomolecular interactive analyses.