Researchers Unveil "unprecedentedly Sensitive" Biochips
Researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), a top technology university in Russia, have developed new biosensor chips of "unprecedentedly high sensitivity." They replaced gold, which is typically used in such devices, with copper. The approach is expected to not only lower the cost of the end solutions but also make biosensor manufacturing technology much simpler, the developers claimed in their English-language article in Langmuir.
In their experiments, nanooptics and plasmonics specialists at MIPT's Center for Photonics and 2D Materials used copper and graphene oxide to create the key sensitive element of their biosensor. That reportedly resulted in a dramatically increased sensitivity without any noticeable change in chip configuration, which makes the new solution compatible with the biosensors that are currently available in the market, such as Biacore, Reichert, BioNavis or BiOptix.
