The electrophotonic silicon biosensor
Abstract
The emergence of personalized and stratified medicine requires label-free, low-cost diagnostic technology capable of monitoring multiple disease biomarkers in parallel. Silicon photonic biosensors combine high-sensitivity analysis with scalable, low-cost manufacturing, but they tend to measure only a single biomarker and provide no information about their (bio)chemical activity. Here we introduce an electrochemical silicon photonic sensor capable of highly sensitive and multiparameter profiling of biomarkers. Our electrophotonic technology consists of microring resonators optimally n-doped to support high Q resonances alongside electrochemical processes in situ. The inclusion of electrochemical control enables site-selective immobilization of different biomolecules on individual microrings within a sensor array. The combination of photonic and electrochemical characterization also provides additional quantitative information and unique insight into chemical reactivity that is unavailable with photonic detection alone. By exploiting both the photonic and the electrical properties of silicon, the sensor opens new modalities for Sensing on the microscale.
Citation
Juan-Colás , J , Parkin , A , Dunn , K E , Scullion , M G , Krauss , T F & Johnson , S D 2016 , ' The electrophotonic silicon biosensor ' , Nature Communications , vol. 7 , 12769 . https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12769
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2016. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description
J.J.-C. was supported by a PhD studentship funded by the Departments of Physics and Electronics of the University of York. K.E.D. and S.D.J. acknowledge the University of York for the award of an Institutional Equipment Grant and financial support from the EPSRC Platform Grant EP/K040820/1. M.G.S. and T.F.K. thank the EPSRC Programme Grant ‘Structured Light’ EP/J01771X/1 for financial support. A.P., S.D.J. and T.F.K. acknowledge the support of the Biological Physical Sciences Institute at the University of York.Collections
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