Micro/Nano Cell-Substrate Impedance Biosensors

Abstract

Electrical cell–substrate impedance sensing (ECIS) is a powerful biophysical technology that can realize realtime noninvasive monitoring of the cells in vitro cultured physiological changes including cell adhesion, growth, motility, death, and so on. The changes of cells cultured on the electrode microarray will be induced by internal and external stimulation. In this chapter, the ECIS cell impedance model, ECIS cell growth detection principle, ECIS cell pulsation measuring principle, processing procedures of the ECIS sensor chip, and ECIS instrumentation system design are introduced. Then the method of enhancing the adhesion of a cell on the gold electrode’s surface is stated; the most used method is chemical surface modification. The ECIS sensor has attracted more and more attention because of its many advantages such as being noncontact, realtime, noninvasive, and so on. Therefore, the ECIS technology provides a good platform for noninvasively and instantaneously detecting and analyzing cell responses to chemical and biological agents. The application of the ECIS sensor is presented in the rest of this chapter, including drug screening of verapamil by using rat cardiomyocytes, environment monitoring such as drinking water supplies from chemical contaminants, food analysis such as the shellfish poisoning (PSP) toxins in fish or shellfish, cancer research, and other applications. ECIS has the characteristics of being a fast, long-term, nondestructive, and high-throughput measurement, which makes it a promising development direction.