Porous silicon biosensors on the advance

Genetic engineering has been used extensively for improving cold resistance in plants. In this paper, an optical immunoassay was developed by the optic reflectance spectroscopy of the porous silicon biosensor to monitor the success of transgenic frost-resistant cotton. Transgenic cotton extract samples and anti- antifreeze protein (AFP) antibodies were employed as the target and probe, respectively. Porous silicon is functionalized by using oxidation and silanization, then anti- AFP antibodies were immobilized to the porous silicon pore used a crosslink method. The changes of reflectance spectrum before and after antigen-antibody react ion are observed. The results show that transgenic frost-resistant cotton extract samples caused obvious red shift in reflectance spectrum of porous silicon while common cotton was not. Control experiment with negative antibodies shows high specifcity and conventional ELASA and Western experiment were also carried for comparison. Compare to conventional ELASA and Western, porous silicon biosensor is quick and accurate determination for the detection of transgenic cotton of antifeezing protein.

The ease of fabricating high quality photonic crystals from porous silicon and its biocompatibility have inspired the conception of various biosensing schemes using this material. However, the instability of porous silicon has significantly slowed progress in this area. Here we discuss the potential of different porous silicon photonic crystals for biosensing in the context of its surface chemistry and nanostructure, both of which need to be optimized to obtain sensitive and stable devices. Of particular promise are recent approaches that use porous silicon as sensors for enzymatic activity, for cell capture and concentration devices.

13 - Nanoporous silicon biosensors for DNA sensing

Paper-based sensors are a new alternative technology for fabricating simple, low-cost, portable and disposable analytical devices for many application areas including clinical diagnosis, food quality control and environmental monitoring. The unique properties of paper which allow passive liquid transport and compatibility with chemicals/biochemicals are the main advantages of using paper as a sensing platform. Depending on the main goal to be achieved in paper-based sensors, the fabrication methods and the analysis techniques can be tuned to fulfill the needs of the end-user. Current paper-based sensors are focused on microfluidic delivery of solution to the detection site whereas more advanced designs involve complex 3-D geometries based on the same microfluidic principles. Although paper-based sensors are very promising, they still suffer from certain limitations such as accuracy and sensitivity. However, it is anticipated that in the future, with advances in fabrication and analytical techniques, that there will be more new and innovative developments in paper-based sensors. These sensors could better meet the current objectives of a viable low-cost and portable device in addition to offering high sensitivity and selectivity, and multiple analyte discrimination. This paper is a review of recent advances in paper-based sensors and covers the following topics: existing fabrication techniques, analytical methods and application areas. Finally, the present challenges and future outlooks are discussed.

Multiplexed isothermal nucleic acid amplification

Advances in bacterial concentration methods and their integration in portable detection platforms: A review

Optical micro-ring resonator sensors are an emerging category of label-free optical sensors for bio/chemical sensing that have recently been under intensive investigation. Researchers of this technology have been motivated by a tremendous breadth of different applications, including medical diagnosis, environmental monitoring, homeland security, and food quality control, which require sensitive analytical tools. Ring resonator sensors use total internal reflection to support circulating optical resonances called whispering gallery modes (WGMs). The WGMs have an evanescent field of several hundred nanometers into the surrounding medium, and can therefore detect the refractive index change induced when the analyte binds to the resonator surface. Despite the small physical size of a resonator, the circulating nature of the WGM creates extremely long effective lengths, greatly increasing light–matter interaction and improving its sensing performance. Moreover, only small sample volume is needed for detection because the sensors can be fabricated in sizes well below 100 μm. The small footprint allows integration of those ring resonator sensors onto lab-on-a-chip types of devices for multiplexed detection. This chapter gives an introduction to the ring resonator sensing principles. Different ring resonator configurations are illustrated as well, including microspheres, microfabricated planar ring resonators, and capillary-based opto-fluidic ring resonators. Their sensing performances are evaluated and compared quantitatively. Finally, the future development for ring resonator sensors is discussed.

Recently, photochemical synthesis has attracted wide interest on in situ preparing the surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate with excellent performance, especially in a compact space and microfluidic channel. Herein, a facile, green and cost-effective approach to in situ photochemically synthesize silver nanoaggregates is demonstrated for SERS applications. By adjusting the photo-irradiation conditions, the morphologies and sizes of the silver nanoaggregates can be deliberately tailored. The synthesized silver nanoaggregates-based substrates exhibit a highly sensitive and reproducible SERS activity with a low detection limit of 10−8 M for 4-Aminothiophenol detection and relative standard deviation of 12.3%, paving an efficient and promising route for in situ SERS-based rapid detection in the environmental monitoring and food quality control.

This thesis summarizes a three years scientific research investigation on the design and fabrication of porous silicon based optical devices for applications in the field of biochemical sensing. Porous silicon is an ideal transducer material due to its sponge-like morphology, characterized by a specific surface area up to 500 m2 cm-3, which assures an effective interaction with gas and liquid substances. Moreover, porous silicon is a low cost material, completely compatible with standard microelectronic processes. In this work, different porous silicon structures such as Fabry-Perot interferometer, Bragg mirror, optical microcavity, Thue-Morse sequences and optical waveguide have been realized and characterized as optical transducers for the monitoring of chemical and biological interactions. The selectivity, reversibility and sensitivity of these devices as optical sensors have been discussed. The porous silicon surface has been modified in order to gain chemical stability, proper wettability, and specific features such as biomolecules immobilization. Standard chemical functionalizations, but also an innovative pure biological passivation method based on selfassembled biofilms of the Hydrophobins proteins, have been successfully experimented. Some standard micromachining techniques, such as HF wet etching and anodic bonding, have been optimized to integrate the porous silicon sensing element into a Lab-on-Chip prototype. The integrated devices have been characterized as fast sensors of chemical compounds and response times shorter than 100 ms have been demonstrated. The Direct-Laser-Writing of the porous silicon surface, as alternative process to the photolithographic patterning in the device miniaturization has been also exploited. Finally, a bottom-up approach in microoptics has been developed by using the silica shells of some marine Diatoms, microalgae which show impressive morphological and physical analogies with porous silicon.

Trends in transducer technologies are reviewed with attention given to electrochemical, optical and piezoelectric transducers. Novel approaches to solid-state biosensors are examined, with emphasis on hybrid gate field-effect-transistor technology, 3-D multisensor arrays, light-addressable potentiometric sensors, and microelectrochemical devices. It is concluded that trends in sensor architecture and the development of molecular-based transduction technologies are likely to have significant impact on the next generation of biosensor devices.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

In the global market era, food product control is very challenging. It is impossible to track and control all production and delivery chains not only for regular customers but also for the State Sanitary Inspections. Certified laboratories currently use accurate food safety and quality inspection methods. However, these methods are very laborious and costly. The present review highlights the need to develop fast, robust, and cost-effective analytical assays to determine food contamination. Application of the molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) as selective recognition units for chemosensors’ fabrication was herein explored. MIPs enable fast and inexpensive electrochemical and optical transduction, significantly improving detectability, sensitivity, and selectivity. MIPs compromise durability of synthetic materials with a high affinity to target analytes and selectivity of molecular recognition. Imprinted molecular cavities, present in MIPs structure, are complementary to the target analyte molecules in terms of size, shape, and location of recognizing sites. They perfectly mimic natural molecular recognition. The present review article critically covers MIPs’ applications in selective assays for a wide range of food products. Moreover, numerous potential applications of MIPs in the food industry, including sample pretreatment before analysis, removal of contaminants, or extraction of high-value ingredients, are discussed.

The porous silicon (PS) has gained increasing attentions in fields of nanoenergetic materials because of its especial chemical properties and mesoporous structured property (a large specific surface area: ～600m2/g). In this paper, the patterned (PS) films were realized by lithography technique on the polished surface of monocrystal silicon substrates, and the PS nanoenergetic chips (nECs) were created by impregnating the nanoscale pores of PS with ammonium perchlorate under the ultrasonic wave. The combustion of PS nECs was ignited by single pulse laser and the selfsustained burning was recoded by an optical high-speed camera at 20,000 frames per second. Its combustion performance was enhanced by ultrasonic wave in fabrications. Experiment results shown that the radial burning and channel burning were typical stages in combustions of PS nECs. In addition, the igniting energy of pulse laser beams affected the burning properties of PS nECs: the combustion of PS nECs could translate from propellant burning to deflagration with increases of laser beams energy ranged from 0.134mJ to 425mJ. In this work, the diameter of the irradiated spot on the PS nECs was about 700μm.. A strong plume of flame was emitted from the surface of PS nECs and this indicated that the potential for PS nECs to be applied as microigniters matrix chips and microthrusters matrix chips.

Research in biosensing currently occupies an important role among biomolecular detection techniques, especially with respect to medical diagnoses. Is this sense, the development of biosensors based on the localized surface plasmon resonance (an optical transducer) or electrochemical transductions have been highlighted. However, optical and electrochemical detection working together enable more versatile detections in biosensing. Thus, we propose a dual sensor, which incorporates these two mechanisms on the same platform. The sensor shared the same transducer that was based on a glass-indium thin oxide (ITO) surface covered with gold nanoparticles. The transducer was prepared by the immobilization of gold nanoparticles on (3-aminopropyl)triethoxysilane-activated glass-ITO. The substrate ability to respond to physical surface variations was assessed. For this, measurements of the gold nanoparticles band redshift (plasmonic transduction) and charge transfer resistance from impedance spectra (electrochemical transduction) were performed. The platform was able to detect streptavidin immobilized on the surface by both mechanisms demonstrating its applicability as a device for biodetection in dual detection mode.

Silicon quantum dot is nanometer sized single crystalline silicon particles. It shows exotic luminescence properties such as size tuneablilty of luminescence band and quasi-direct electron-hole recombination resulting in efficient visible luminescence at room temperature, due to quantum confinement effects. Because of its environmental friendliness and low cost, the silicon quantum dot is a promising material for future light-emitting applications. Recently, a free-standing form of silicon quantum dot dispersed in solution, i.e., colloidal silicon quantum dots are intensively investigated due to their potential usefulness in solution based light emitting technology. The luminescence properties and solution dispersibility in silicon quantum dots are known to depend on the surface properties such as the coverage of surface termination and the kinds of surface terminated species.Various formation techniques for colloidal silicon quantum dot have been proposed, such as wet-chemical synthesis, plasma synthesis and high-temperature thermal processing. Pulsed-laser irradiation in liquid is one of the simplest top-down method for the formation of colloidal silicon quantum dots. By irradiating bulk crystalline silicon target with a high power pulsed-laser beam in liquid, silicon quantum dots are easily formed due to the ablation of silicon crystal and resultant condensation effect of ablated silicon at the liquid interface. An additional merit of this process is the easiness of surface termination control; because the nanocrystal surface formed by laser ablation actively reacts with molecules consisting of solution, one can control the surface termination by changing the kinds of solution. However, the control of the formed quantum dot size is still a challenging work and the size distribution of the quantum dots prepared by this process is usually wide.To overcome these issues, we developed a novel top-down pulsed laser irradiation technique for the formation of colloidal silicon quantum dots. We used an interconnected wire-nanostructure assembly, i.e., porous silicon (PSi), as a target material for the laser irradiation process, on behalf of bulk crystalline silicon target. PSi has beneficial properties for laser irradiation target such as low thermal conductivity and large surface areas. Because of these properties, the pulsed-laser irradiation of PSi target in organic solution allows us to generate the silicon quantum dots with relatively high preparation yields, and with various emission bands by changing irradiation conditions and the porosity of PSi. Furthermore, in our developed process, the formed dots are brighter than the original PSi target due to the stable organic terminations.Recently, we further improved our developed facile formation process of luminescent colloidal silicon quantum dots via porous silicon target. In the improved process, we employed electrochemically prepared PSi flakes, which purely consists of porous layer. The PSi flakes show extremely low thermal conductivity and heat capacity due to their intrinsic geometrical feature. Thus, even a low temperature thermal treatment as well as pulsed laser irradiation to PSi flakes in organic solution are efficiently converted porous silicon layer to colloidal silicon quantum dots. Furthermore, we succeeded in preparing silicon quantum dots dispersed in a polar and non-polar solvent depending on the ligands terminated on the dot surface by using different solutions. The present facile formation process of silicon quantum dots from PSi allows us to develop future top-down and low-cost mass production of luminescent colloidal silicon quantum dots.

A biosensor is an analytical device that responds to an analyte in an appropriate sample and interprets its concentration as an electrical signal via a suitable combination of a biological recognition system and an electrochemical transducer. As a result of recent scientific and technological progress, such devices are likely to play an increasingly important role in generating analytical information in all sectors of human endeavour, from medicine to the military. In particular, biosensors will form the basis of cheap, simple devices for acquiring chemical information, bringing sophisticated analytical capabilities to the non-specialist and general public alike. The market opportunities for the rapid exploitation of novel developments in this sector are substantial. Biosensor research is also likely to have a significant impact on the development of modern electronics.