All-carbon suspended nanowire sensors as a rapid highly-sensitive label-free chemiresistive biosensing platform

Thiha A 1 , Ibrahim F 2 , Muniandy S 3 , Dinshaw IJ 4 , Teh SJ 1 , Thong KL 5 Show all authors , Leo BF 6 , Madou M 7

Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Electronic address: fatimah@um.edu.my
  • 3 Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Nanotechnology and Catalysis Research Centre, Institute of Graduate Studies, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 4 Nanotechnology and Catalysis Research Centre, Institute of Graduate Studies, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 5 Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Microbiology Unit, Institute of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 6 Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Department of Biomedical Imaging, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • 7 Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME), Department of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya, 50603 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA; Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA
Biosens Bioelectron, 2018 Jun 01;107:145-152.
PMID: 29455024 DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2018.02.024

Abstract

Nanowire sensors offer great potential as highly sensitive electrochemical and electronic biosensors because of their small size, high aspect ratios, and electronic properties. Nevertheless, the available methods to fabricate carbon nanowires in a controlled manner remain limited to expensive techniques. This paper presents a simple fabrication technique for sub-100 nm suspended carbon nanowire sensors by integrating electrospinning and photolithography techniques. Carbon Microelectromechanical Systems (C-MEMS) fabrication techniques allow fabrication of high aspect ratio carbon structures by patterning photoresist polymers into desired shapes and subsequent carbonization of resultant structures by pyrolysis. In our sensor platform, suspended nanowires were deposited by electrospinning while photolithography was used to fabricate support structures. We have achieved suspended carbon nanowires with sub-100 nm diameters in this study. The sensor platform was then integrated with a microfluidic chip to form a lab-on-chip device for label-free chemiresistive biosensing. We have investigated this nanoelectronics label-free biosensor's performance towards bacterial sensing by functionalization with Salmonella-specific aptamer probes. The device was tested with varying concentrations of Salmonella Typhimurium to evaluate sensitivity and various other bacteria to investigate specificity. The results showed that the sensor is highly specific and sensitive in detection of Salmonella with a detection limit of 10 CFU mL-1. Moreover, this proposed chemiresistive assay has a reduced turnaround time of 5 min and sample volume requirement of 5 µL which are much less than reported in the literature.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

MeSH terms
Similar publications