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. 2022 Jan 26;22(3):969.
doi: 10.3390/s22030969.

Design of a Portable Microfluidic Platform for EGOT-Based in Liquid Biosensing

Matteo Segantini  1 , Matteo Parmeggiani  1 , Alberto Ballesio  1 , Gianluca Palmara  1 , Francesca Frascella  1 , Simone Luigi Marasso  1   2 , Matteo Cocuzza  1   2
Affiliations

Design of a Portable Microfluidic Platform for EGOT-Based in Liquid Biosensing

Matteo Segantini et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

In biosensing applications, the exploitation of organic transistors gated via a liquid electrolyte has increased in the last years thanks to their enormous advantages in terms of sensitivity, low cost and power consumption. However, a practical aspect limiting the use of these devices in real applications is the contamination of the organic material, which represents an obstacle for the realization of a portable sensing platform based on electrolyte-gated organic transistors (EGOTs). In this work, a novel contamination-free microfluidic platform allowing differential measurements is presented and validated through finite element modeling simulations. The proposed design allows the exposure of the sensing electrode without contaminating the EGOT device during the whole sensing tests protocol. Furthermore, the platform is exploited to perform the detection of bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a validation test for the introduced differential protocol, demonstrating the capability to detect BSA at 1 pM concentration. The lack of contamination and the differential measurements provided in this work can be the first steps towards the realization of a reliable EGOT-based portable sensing instrument.

Keywords: EGOFETs; OECTs; biosensors; microfluidics; simulations.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Top (a), perspective (b) and side (c) view of the microfluidic platform hosting two gold electrodes (reference and functionalized gates) and the EGOT biosensor.
Figure 2
Figure 2
BSA concentration during the different steps of the sensing protocol: (a) at the beginning, (b) after analyte injection, (c) after incubation, (d) after wash.
Figure 3
Figure 3
BSA concentration evolution in three different points of the geometry: the functionalized gate electrode chamber, the bridge and the biosensor chamber.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Transfer characteristic curves recorded with VD = −0.4 V in PBS 1×. Solid lines represent the channel current ID while dashed lines represent the gate current IG.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Differential channel current variation with the BSA concentration in PBS 1×. The error bars are calculated on at least three different devices.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Differential variation of (a) the threshold voltage and (b) the maximum transconductance. The error bars are calculated on at least three different devices.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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