Easy to use plastic optical fiber-based biosensor for detection of butanal.

The final goal of this work is to achieve a selective detection of butanal by the realization of a simple, small-size and low cost experimental approach. To this end, a porcine odorant-binding protein was used in connection with surface plasmon resonance transduction in a plastic optical fiber tool for the selective detection of butanal by a competitive assay. This allows to reduce the cost and the size of the sensing device and it offers the possibility to design a "Lab-on-a-chip" platform. The obtained results showed that this system approach is able to selectively detect the presence of butanal in the concentration range from 20 μM to 1000 μM.