Soft Biosensing Harnessing Nanoporous Conductive Wires

Nanoporous polymers have emerged as one of the most powerful platforms for microfluidic applications. These types of polymers have shown promise for new possibilities for ion transportation, counting particles, sensing molecules, and so on. However, flow in porous media has been a subject of active research for the past few decades. Recently, ion-selective membranes have also gained significant interest in detecting different biomolecules from biofluids, i.e., sweat sampling and analysis. Inspired by the recent advances in nanoporous polymers, we recently investigated the surfaces of the commercially available nanoporous polymers for droplet nanofluidics and biomolecule sensing. Here, we aim to understand the flow behavior of microdroplets on nanoporous conductive wires for biosensing applications. Also, we will demonstrate the unconventional fabrication of the conductive wires. Our preliminary investigation harnessing the nanoporous conductive wires show promise for applications that has potential impacts on biomolecule sensing, nano-dilution, zonal analyte transfer in microtubes, and intermolecular interaction at the nanopores. While a majority of the nanofluidic demonstrations in literature utilize lithography-based approaches, our method of droplets manipulation is unconventional and currently foreign in literature; however, it is fairly simple, easy to replicate and does not require any cleanroom facilities. We investigated the micro/nanostructure of the material to understand the droplet transport processes through the nanopores and the electrical responses of the conductive wires. The successful demonstrations will interpret and guide the broad potential for next-generation of soft biomedical devices for unconventional sensing applications.