12 hours ago by Kurt Pfitzer Yongkang Gao (right) and Filbert J. Bartoli took advantage of nanofabrication advances to improve the resolution of their nanoscale biosensors to levels almost as sensitive as those achieved by much larger commercial systems. Credit: Christa Neu

(Phys.org) Over the past half-century, biosensors have opened a new window on the physical world while revolutionizing much of modern society.

By utilizing an electronic or optical system, biosensors detect and interact with the components of biological materials, making it possible to analyze DNA, measure the content of glucose in the blood, detect biotoxins in the water and the atmosphere and much more.

Sales of biosensors reached $8.5 billion worldwide in 2012 and are expected to double to $16.8 by 2018. The United States, with $2.6 billion in sales in 2012, leads the world market.

Yongkang Gao has spent much of the past three years using nanotechnology to improve the speed, efficiency and sensitivity of biosensors while dramatically decreasing their size and cost of operation.

His goal is to transform today's relatively bulky surface plasmon resonance (SPR) biosensors, which take up most of a desktop, into nanoplasmonic biosensors that can be held in the hand and can perform hundreds of testsmedical, environmental or otherat a time.

Gao, who completed his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in January and is now a researcher with Bell labs in New Jersey, is the lead author on an article that a team of Lehigh engineering researchers published recently in the journal Lab on a Chip. The group also contributed the cover image for the issue.

Titled "Plasmonic interferometric sensor arrays for high-performance label-free biomolecular detection," the article was coauthored with Zheming Xin, Beibei Zeng, Qiaoqiang Gan, Xuanhong Cheng and Filbert J. Bartoli. Xin and Zeng are Ph.D. candidates. Gan, who earned his Ph.D. from Lehigh in 2010, is an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Bartoli, the Chandler Weaver Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is Gao's Ph.D. adviser and leads the project. Cheng, the P.C. Rossin Assistant Professor in the department of materials science and engineering, is director of Lehigh's Lab of Micro- and Nanotechnology for Diagnostics and Biology.

Improving on the "gold standard"

Scientists have made great progress in recent decades with labeled biosensors that use a receptor attached to a fluorescent molecule to target biomolecules. When bonding occurs between the target and receptor molecules, the fluorescent label emits a light signal whose color provides information about the identities of the two molecules that are bonding and the strength of the bond.

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Using nanotechnology to improve the speed, efficiency and sensitivity of biosensors