Electrode surface roughness greatly enhances the sensitivity of electrochemical non-enzymatic glucose sensors

Abstract

With the development of medical science and the extension of people's life expectancy, medical care and health monitoring in daily life have become a universal, worldwide concern. Accurate quantification of glucose is of great concern in diagnostics because it can indicate diabetes and help avoid related medical complications. Over the years, a variety of analytical methods have been used to sense glucose with good selectivity, good feasibility, sensitive response and low cost. Nevertheless, there is a lack of universal approach which can be applicable for the measurements across a variety of biological fluids (e.g., blood, sweat and urine), as the concentrations of glucose in there fluids vary significantly from low-micromolar to millimolar range. To fill this role, we proposed a glucose biosensor platform to improve the adaptability of glucose biosensor in clinical application. In our study, we coupled an electrochemical etching approach with the manipulation of nanostructured surfaces of gold electrodes to achieve arbitrarily tunable detection range for glucose measurements, with the detection range in blood sample (20 ∼ 1000 μM), sweat (6 ∼ 1000 μM), and urine (1.6 ∼ 100 μM), respectively.