Alkaline phosphatase inhibition based conductometric biosensor for phosphate estimation in biological fluids

Determination of phosphate ions concentration is very important from both, environmental and clinical point of view. In this study, a simple and novel conductometric biosensor for indirect determination of the phosphate ions in aqueous solution has been developed. The developed biosensor is based on the inhibition of immobilized alkaline phosphatase activity, in the presence of the phosphate ions. This is the first time we developed a mono-enzymatic biosensor for indirect estimation of phosphate ions. The developed biosensor showed a broad linear response (as compared to other reported biosensors) for phosphate ions in the range of 0.5-5.0 mM (correlation coefficient=0.995), with a detection limit of 50 µM. Different optimized parameters were obtained as the buffer concentration of 30 mM, substrate concentration of 1.0 mM, and a pH of 9.0. All the optimized parameters were analyzed by analysis of variance, and were found to be statistically significant at a level of α=0.05. The developed biosensor is also suitable to determine the serum phosphate concentration, with a recovery of 86-104%, while a recovery of 102% was obtained from the water samples that were spiked with 500 µM phosphate. A relative standard deviation in the conductance response for five successive measurements (n=5) did not exceed 7%, with a shelf life of 30 days. With a lower detection limit and a higher recovery, the biosensor provides a facile approach for phosphate estimation in biological fluids.