TÜBA Associate Member Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan and Her Team Receive First Place
TÜBA Associate Member and Ege University Teaching Staff Member Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan and her team won first place among the 179 projects selected from 450 applicants in the “III. Food R&D Project Market” held in Izmir on April 21-22, 2015.
Ege University Faculty of Pharmacy, Analytical Chemistry Department Teaching Staff Member Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan and her students Ece Ekşin and Gülşah Çonkur, who entered the event with their project titled “Single-use Sensor Technology for the Electrochemical Determination of Gluten in Foods”, won the 15 thousand TL first place award at the “III. Food R&D Project Market” organized with the support of the Ministry of Economy and the Turkish Exporters' Assembly (TEA) and the coordination of the Aegean Exporters' Associations (AEA). The second place award was won by Mustafa Kürşat Demir from the Necmettin Erbakan University Food Engineering Department for his ‘Stabilization of Wheat Germ with Non-thermal Technologies” project while the third place was won by the ‘No-Melt Turkish Delight Ice Cream’ project by Aykut Önder Barazi ve Bengisu Erşan from the Gaziantep University Food Engineering Department. The competition also presented honorable mentions of 1500 TL to three projects while two high school students from Izmir were given special awards for their creative ideas as the youngest participants.
The coordinator of the “Single-use Sensor” project, which measures gluten in foods, a critical issue for Celiac patients who are forced to eat gluten-free foods, Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan said the following about the content of their project and the first place award:
“The fast detection of gluten in foods and determination of possible contaminants is very important and currently gluten analysis is being done by methods which combine time consuming, expensive and arduous procedures (spectroscopy, Chromatography and ELISA). With the graphite-based “single-use” sensor technology in our project the oxidation signal belonging to gluten was measured and it was determined that this signal increases in connection with the amount of gluten in the setting. Detecting gluten in flour samples using the single-use sensors was accomplished quickly and precisely and it was demonstrated that the analysis method could also be applied to the detection of gluten in different foods like yeast and vinegar.
The sensor we used in our project is made of pencil tips or in other words graphite tips. In 2000-2001 when I went to continue my post doctorate research, I participated in the Sensor chip Laboratory studies of Prof. Joseph Wang from New Mexico State University (NMSU, A.B.D) and focused on the pencil tip graphite based sensor applications published in literature by Prof. Dr. Wang in the year 2000. When we take a look at literature we can observe that since pencil tip graphite based sensors are inexpensive and easy to use, have high sensitivity in analyses and provide repeatable results, they are not only useful in the food industry but also create a base for “single-use” sensor technology in health, defense and environmental analyses. As a result a pencil tip graphite based single-use electrochemical sensor technology to quickly and precisely detect gluten in small samples of food was developed in this project, and in this scope, our study has the distinction of being a first in literature (Food Chemistry, 184 (2015) 183–187).
The “single-use sensor technology developed for analyzing gluten” in our project will enable gluten to be analyzed in the production and inspection of gluten-free foods. The single-use sensors, which have high commercial potential, will be applicable for analyzing gluten in pre/post production products and in the field once it is minimized as a test kit and combined with a portable device.”
Who is Prof. Dr. Kadriye Arzum Erdem Gürsan?
Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan graduated third in 1993 from the Ege University Faculty of Pharmacy and completed her master’s and doctorate in the Department of Analytical Chemistry of the same faculty. Since 2001 she has been conducting successful work in developing electrochemical (bio) sensor technologies based on materials with different properties (nano) in national and international projects. Prof. Dr. Erdem Gürsan won a TÜBİTAK- Münir Birsel Foundation doctorate scholarship in 1999 and participated in research on the team of Prof. Dr. Emil Palecek at the Biophysics Institute connected to the Czech Academy of Sciences. Between 2000-2001 she was awarded the TÜBİTAK-NATO B1 scholarship to continue post doctorate research in New Mexico State University (NMSU) at the Sensor-chip Laboratory of Prof. Dr. Joseph Wang participating in “research on new applications for electrochemical DNA biosensors”. In later years she received numerous invitations from universities and research centers in Spain, the Czech Republic, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Northern Ireland and England to conduct research and start projects. She has completed the planned studies successfully.
Prof. Dr. Erdem Gürsan has 4 TÜBİTAK projects, which she completed as the coordinator in 2002-2014, and 2 TÜBİTAK projects, which she is still in the process of coordinating and 2 projects based on international cooperation (Royal Society-International Joint Project (UK) and ASCR-TÜBİTAK Project) which she has completed as a coordinator. Prof. Erdem Gürsan has 108 scientific publications in the arbitrated journals scanned by the International Science Citation Index, 7 chapters in books and a book which she edited (Number of references 2669, h-index=32). In addition to 3 doctorate and 8 master’s thesis consultations completed she still has 4 doctorate and 4 master’s thesis consultations continuing.
Prof. Dr. K. Arzum Erdem Gürsan's main fields of research are in the development and application of nanomaterials (magnetic particles, graphene, carbon nanotubes, dendrimers, metal and metal oxide nanoparticles, nanorods, nano-cables, etc.) and electrochemical (bio) sensor technologies based on conductive polymers and biopolymers. With the new generation biosensors that have been created the team is researching drug, protein and toxin detection, drug-DNA interaction and aptamer-protein interaction analyses; and continuing research on various biomolecular detections like set selected nucleic acid hybridization based on contagious and genetic diseases in the scope of nucleic acid (DNA, microRNA, etc.) analyses. She also has studies on developing sensors for the electrochemical analyses of various toxins and environmental pollution agents.