Aptamers and their applications

Aptamers are considered as therapeutic agents in analytical chemistry and appear as optimal components for assembling the biosensors by immobilization. Aptamers are also used in many analytical applications, such as in technologies based on separation science, various chromatographic techniques or capillary electrophoresis, and many new exciting analytical problems can be solved with these new compounds. The aptamer selection process can be manipulated to obtain aptamers that bind a specific region of the target and with specific binding properties in different binding conditions. The aptamers are produced by chemical synthesis and purified to a very high degree by eliminating the batch-to-batch variation found when using antibodies. Aptamers are very stable and they can recover their native active conformation after denaturation.