DEVELOPMENT OF ELECTROCHEMICAL BIOSENSOR FOR DETECTION OF ASPARAGINE IN LEUKEMIC SAMPLES

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is one of the deadly diseases among children causing a number of deaths worldwide. It could be treated using chemotherapy, bone marrow transplantation or irradiation therapy but it may cause side-effects. Therefore, interest has arisen in the use of plants for treatment of ALL. Cannabis sativa is known to produce L-asparaginase which is used to treat ALL. L-asparaginase breaks down asparagine to aspartic acid and ammonia. Thus the cancer cells die due to asparagine starvation as they cannot synthesize asparagine on their own. Lasparaginase was extracted from C. sativa and immobilized to develop a biosensor for the detection of asparagine levels in leukemic serum samples. Out of the various immobilized techniques Polyvinyl Alcohol and hydrosol gel on nylon membrane were found to give the fastest response. Therefore, they were used to detect asparagine levels in leukemic serum samples. The concentration of asparagine in leukemic samples was 10(-2) to 10(-3) M and in normal samples it was 10(-5) M.