Vasoula Skouridou

Vasso Skouridou received her diploma (BSc/MSc) in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 1998 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the same university in 2004. She held a postdoctoral position at the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology of the University of Texas at Austin (USA) (2004-2007) before joining the Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care of the University of California San Francisco (USA) as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a research specialist during the period of 2007-2010. She moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) in 2012, where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher (2012–2016). She joined the Nanobiotechnology and Bioanalysis Group led by Dr. Ciara O’Sullivan in the same department in 2016 as a senior researcher where she remains until today.  

Her main research interests involve the development of bioanalytical assays and biosensors for the detection of target molecules related to health monitoring, food safety and environmental control among others. To this end, she focuses on the development of aptamers against proteins and small molecules, the characterization of DNA-protein and DNA-small molecule interactions, nucleic acids detection and the development of rapid tests employing novel nanomaterials, paper-based assays and DNA binding proteins.  

1. Ortiz M., Jauset-Rubio M., Skouridou V., Machado D., Viveiros M., Clark T.G., Simonova A., Kodr D., Hocek M., O’Sullivan C.K. (2021). “Electrochemical detection of single-nucleotide polymorphism associated with rifampicin resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis using solid-phase primer elongation with ferrocene-linked redox-labeled nucleotides”. ACS Sensors 6:4398-4407. https://doi.org/10.1021/acssensors.1c01710
2. Shkembi X., Skouridou V., Svobodova M., Leonardo S., Bashammakh A.S., Alyoubi A.O., Campàs M., O’Sullivan C.K. (2021). “Hybrid antibody-aptamer assay for detection of tetrodotoxin in pufferfish”. Analytical Chemistry 93:14810-14819. http://doi.org/10.1021/acs.analchem.1c03671
3. Skouridou V., Tomaso H., Rau J., Bashammakh A.S., El-Shahawi M.S., Alyoubi A.O., O’Sullivan C.K. (2019). “Duplex PCR-ELONA for the detection of pork adulteration in meat products”. Food Chemistry 287:354-362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2019.02.095
4. Aktas G.B., Wichers J.H., Skouridou V., van Amerongen A., Masip L. (2019). “Nucleic acid lateral flow assays using a conjugate of a DNA binding protein and carbon nanoparticles”. Microchimica Acta 186:426. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-019-3544-0
5. Skouridou V., Jauset-Rubio M., Ballester P., Bashammakh A.S., El-Shahawi M.S., Alyoubi A.O., O’Sullivan C.K. (2017). “Selection and characterization of DNA aptamers against the steroid testosterone”. Microchimica Acta 184:1631-1639. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00604-017-2136-0