Porous silicon-based electrochemical biosensors

Abstract

Electrochemical biosensors have emerged as very powerful analytical tools in many challenging areas including water and food quality control, and biomedical diagnostics. Porous silicon (pSi) has many desired properties to be used as sensing platform (e.g. extensively tunable structure, versatile surface chemistry and large surface area). However, unavoidable growth of the insulating layer SiO2 at the surface hinders pSi to be used as electrochemical transducer. Therefore, the potential to use carbon-stabilized pSi as electrochemical transducers to design simple, cost-effective, high sensitive and label-free electrochemical biosensors was explored. The designed pSi-based electrochemical biosensors were successfully used for detection of analytes of interest for water quality control and medical diagnostics.