Streptozotocin-induced Alzheimer's disease investigation by one-dimensional plasmonic grating chip

Recently, there has been significant interest in researching brain insulin resistance as it has been hypothesized that it may play a role in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is brain dementia that contributes to damage to the neuron cells and then patient death. This dementia is ranked as the fifth more dangerous disease in the world. Streptozotocin (STZ) is used to induce Alzheimer’s disease experimentally. STZ is toxic to the pancreatic beta cells and induces insulin resistance. Neuroplasmonin techniques have been used to investigate the ability of STZ on the activity of cultured neuron cells. Neuroplasmonic is a novel technology that combines nanotechnology and biosensor. This technique has been used to record neuron signals in vivo and in vitro. Also, it has many facilities such as label-free detection, real-time analysis, biological compatibility, small sample, high throughput, and low detection limit. In this paper, we introduce a one-dimensional electro-plasmonic nanograting platform that consists of a straight nanorod of gold embedded in a dielectric layer of polycarbonate. The chip is connected with an externally applied voltage to induce tunable PIT and increase the sensor sensitivity. To evaluate the sensing performance of the electro-plasmonic sensor, this chip was cultured with Human Nucleus Pulposus Cells (HNPC). The first step was to measure the neuron cell activity in a healthy case. The next step was to measure the activity of neuron cells injected with different concentrations of STZ (0.5, 1, 2 mM) to induce the formation of Alzheimer’s disease in the cultured neuron cells. The results indicated that the electro-plasmonics sensor had a high sensitivity to the cells' activity and showed good results for the effecting STZ on the neuron cell’s activities.