Nanoscopic Biosensors in Microfluidics

Abstract

Synergy between, physics, material sciences and biotechnology during last decade has led to a tremendous scientific progress in the fields of biodetection and nanomedicine. This tight interaction led to the emergence of a new class of bioinspired systems that enables to bring the area of biosensorics e.g. for cell or molecular diagnostics and analytics to the new level. The advances are expected in terms of (i) possibility of early diagnostics of diseases due to the increased sensitivity of the detectors, (ii) real time and high throughput analysis offered by combination of integrated electronics and microfluidic approach, and (iii) establishing the new functional formats for the bioassays. One of the most promising candidates for the future diagnostics are the electronic nanobiosensors that have attracted great attention in the last decades since they provide rich quantitative information for medical and biotechnological assays without pre-treatment and specific optical labelling of the detected species. At the same time, to bring state‐of‐the‐art biomedical diagnostic devices to the hands of the people, it is important to reduce the price of the devices and allow for their high‐volume delivery in a cost‐efficient manner, e.g., container transportation. For the latter, a crucial aspect is to reduce the weight of the device. This can be achieved by replacing the conventional rigid substrates, like Si or glass by light weight and large area polymeric foils. Here I will focus on two flexible diagnostic platforms for the analysis at the micro- and nanoscale, represented by (a) silicon nanowires based field effect transistors and (b) 2D materials based on molybdenum disulfide. [1] Karnaushenko, et al., Adv. Healthc. Mater. 4(10), 1517 (2015). [2] Zhang, et al., Small 15 (23), 1901265 (2019). [3] Baraban, et al. Advanced Science 6 (15), 1900522 (2019).