Photoelectrochemical Workstation for Biosensing Research

生物传感器是检测生物相关分析物的存在、缺失和/或数量的设备。手持和可穿戴生物传感器被设想为通过实现以患者为中心的临床决策和自我健康监测来提高医疗保健的质量和可及性，并允许更有效地使用医疗保健资金。如今，手持式电化学生物传感器被广泛用于监测血糖水平；然而，目前还没有商业上可用的手持式生物传感器用于监测生物分子分析物，如核酸。核酸分析的困难在于，在大量生物背景物质存在的情况下，它们的浓度很低。为了达到临床样品分析所需的飞摩尔检测限，必须提高电化学生物传感器的灵敏度和信噪比。

Biosensors are devices that detect the presence, absences, and/or quantity of biologically-relevant analyte. Handheld and wearable biosensors are envisioned to improve the quality and accessibility of healthcare by enabling patient-centered clinical decision making and self-health monitoring, and allow healthcare funds to be used more effectively. Today’s handheld electrochemical biosensors are widely used for monitoring blood glucose level; however, there is no commercially available handheld biosensor for monitoring biomolecular analytes such as nucleic acids. The difficulty in nucleic acid analysis is that they are available in low concentrations in the presence of a large amount of biological background material. To achieve the femtomolar limit of detection required for analyzing clinical samples, it is essential to improve the sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio of electrochemical biosensors. We propose to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of electrochemical biosensors by replacing the usual electrical excitation and electrochemical current measurement with photonic excitation and electrochemical current measurement. This photoelectrochemical strategy has been shown to reduce the signal-to-noise of electrochemical systems by allowing current measurements to be performed at zero or low applied voltages. More specifically, the proposal is focused on improving the understanding of photoelectrochemical signal generation in systems that use photoelectrochemical and plasmonic nanoparticles. The distance between these nanoparticles can be varied in the presence of specific DNA targets, which provides a strategy for sensing these biomolecules. The requested equipment will enable us to perform high quality photoelectrochemical measurements to better understand the DNA-mediated changes in the photoelectrochemical signal. This will allow us to develop a new class of label-free photoelectrochemical biosensors for use in handheld and continuous monitoring systems. High quality research in this emerging research area will allow us to contribute new knowledge that will be published in high impact journals, and will attract (1) high caliber HQP and provide them with training in a world-class environment, (2) industry collaborations for integrating this new sensing strategy into biosensing systems, and (3) world-class collaborations to McMaster University. This provides us with the opportunity to place Canada at the forefront of photoelectrochemical biosensing research.