Universal Bioanalyte Signal Amplification for Electrochemical Biosensor

While many techniques are currently employed to detect biological analytes, electrochemical detection is very appealing because of its low cost, ease of use, and rapid time for producing a quantitative result. Electrochemical signals are generated by a redox method when redox analytes arepresent in a sample in measureable quantities, such as ~1014 glucose molecules associated with 1.1 mmol/L glucose in blood.However, most clinical and environmental bioanalyte applications require much lower quantities to be measured such as ~106 guanine molecules associated with 5,000 copies/mL of HIV RNA. This is below the detection limit of electrochemical biosensors.

Various approaches have applied to reduce biosensor detection limit. Nanostructured biosensor working electrodes improvesignal-tonoise resolution by reducing the active surface area of the electrode, but encountered challenges with reliably measuring low nanoamp signals, and in fabricating nanoscale structures with poor batch to batch consistency, limited throughput, low production yields, and high unit costs.