Professor Tony Cass’s research falls broadly into the area of bioanalysis with a particular focus in the following areas:
• Biosensors: His Group is producing sensors based on both optical and electrochemical signal transduction schemes for applications in personal healthcare, bioreactor monitoring and clinical diagnostics. These biosensors often exploit engineered proteins.
• Protein Engineering: Although proteins have been widely used in bioanalysis many of their properties are not optimally suited to this application. The group is therefore using protein design tools to re-engineer the properties of proteins to better suit them to this application.
• Microarrays and Microfluidics: Microarrays offer the possibility of massively parallel analysis. The group is working on arrays where the content is based on non-antibody binding proteins of either narrow or broad specificity. They also exploring the use of pattern recognition methods to relate array signatures to the state of the system under analysis
.• Proteomics: The group is using both ‘conventional’ as well as nanomaterials based proteomics to understand how the changes occurring in the protein complements of biological systems relate to their behaviour. In particular, they are interested in the proteomic profiles that develop during the growth of stem cells in controlled culture and during the interactions of cells with synthetic materials.