Physical Electronics Seminar- Advanced Methods for Plant-Based Electrochemical Biosensing - סמינר מחלקה פיסיקלית

You are invited to attend a lecture on Tuesday, June 20th 2023, at 14:00

Room 011, Kitot Building

Advanced Methods for Plant-Based Electrochemical Biosensing 

By:

Tali Dotan

Ph.D. student under the supervision of Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamand

Precision agriculture is a comprehensive system designed to optimize agricultural production by tailoring soil and crop management strategies to the specific conditions of each plant and environment. However, the development of precision agriculture is still hindered by the lack of reliable sensors that can gather accurate data quickly, non-destructively, and at a low cost. One potential solution to this problem is the use of plant-based functional sensors. This Ph.D. work aimed to develop new advanced methods for plant-based electrochemical biosensing, focusing on three directions. The first approach was to develop new materials for soft and flexible sensors, which were fabricated and patterned in a novel approach integrating supersonic cluster beam deposition (SCBD) of gold nanoparticles onto Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) followed by femtosecond (fs) laser processing. SCBD of gold nanoparticles in PDMS

forms a nanocomposite film with mechanical properties similar to those of the elastomeric substrate, therefore, providing good adhesion to the biological surface.

Later, we addressed one of the main problems with functional electrochemical bio-sensors operating in amperometry mode, which is the relatively low current they produce. The study demonstrates redox cycling as a method to increase the signal level at the sensor output, specifically for a plant-based sensor that detects selective enzyme expression in plants. We presented an over X10 amplification of the measured current, compared to standard electrochemical sensors, as well as an improvement in the biological detection time, from forty minutes to ten minutes.

Additionally, we created a computational simulation to study the transport effects on a microfluidic bio-chip in which electrochemical sensing is amplified by redox cycling using an interdigitated electrode array (IDA). These models indicate that there exist two dominant regimes: one which is limited by redox cycling diffusion—a unique feature of IDAs— and another which is limited by convection and has dominant flow effects.

Overall, this multidisciplinary study made significant achievements and paves the path for the implementation of redox-cycling-based plant sensors.

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