Alignment of Colloidal Metal-Oxide Based Nanoparticles Embedded in Polymer-Based Nanofibers via Electrospinning for Electrochemical Biosensing of Microbial Pathogens

The aeronautics industry continues to evolve its approach to deep space exploration and therefore the growing need for rapid accurate biosensing is becoming more and more relevant. Along with size, weight, and various technology constraints making a nano-scale biosensor is critical to furthering this exploratory venture. Furthermore, to expand this endeavor the proposed research chiefly investigates the viability of the design of an electrochemical biosensor to detect microbial pathogens. Through embedding colloidal metal oxide-based nanoparticles (MOxs) in electrospun polymer-based nanofibers one can further investigate the interfacial passivation between the biomolecule under study and the MOx embedded nanofibers. The unique characteristics of these adjoined nanomaterials such as large surface areas can provide many opportunities for manipulating their shape, size, and other properties. Which is why the use of several different metal oxide (MOX) based electrodes aptly placed as a bio-field effect transistors (bioFET) are used in this study as electrochemical sensors for a specific antigen/antibody detection. This study utilizes the testing methods of Cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) using the VersaStat 4 Potentiostat to measure the sensors’ responses. It will be necessary to analyze and identify the effect on sensitivity, response time, and LOD of each sensor.