Abstract
Over the past decade, synthesized nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotube, nanoparticle, quantum dot, and nanowire, have already made breakthroughs in various fields, including biomedical sensors. Enormous surface area-to-volume ratio of the nanomaterials increases sensitivity dramatically compared with macro-sized material. Herein we present a comprehensive review about the working principle and fabrication process of nanowire sensor. Moreover, its applications for the detection of biomarker, virus, and DNA, as well as for drug discovery, are reviewed. Recent advances including self-powering, reusability, sensitivity in high ionic strength solvent, and long-term stability are surveyed and highlighted as well. Nanowire is expected to lead significant improvement of biomedical sensor in the near future.
Highlights
Biomedical sensors with high sensitivity could make it possible to detect diseases in their early state, drastically increasing the chance of potentially life-saving detection and intervention
Nanowire field-effect transistors (FETs) are a type of nanowire sensor that have originated from the standard planar FETs which consist of a gate, source, drain, and the body (Figure 1A)
Even though its sensitivity is impressively high compared with other methods, its analytical signal intensity is still too low to be contaminated by high background noise, especially seen with in vivo environments
Summary
Biomedical sensors with high sensitivity could make it possible to detect diseases in their early state, drastically increasing the chance of potentially life-saving detection and intervention. The electron movement of the nanostructure is confined by quantization effects, resulting in quantum size effects, in which the discrete energy levels of the device depend on the size of the structure Both the excited energy of semiconductors at the lowest state and the strength of volume-normalized oscillator are increased by decreasing the scale [8], allowing the nanostructures to have a high energy conversion efficiency and relatively low thermal noise [9]. Semiconductor nanowires made it possible to detect various species electrically and without labels [15] These nanowires were fabricated from semiconductor materials [16] and their surface can be readily modified to become sensitive to chemical and biological species [17,18]. We discuss the advancement of long-term stability, sensitivity in solvents with high ionic strength, reusability, and self-powering, as those advancements significantly impact on overcoming the current limitations of nanowire-based biomedical sensors
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