Graphene-based biosensors

International audienceReliable data obtained from analysis of DNA, proteins, bacteria and other disease related molecules or organisms in biological samples has become a fundamental and crucial part of human health diagnostics and therapy. The development of non-invasive tests that are rapid, sensitive, specific and simple would allow preventing patient discomfort, delay in diagnosis, and the follow-up of the status of the disease. Bioanalysis is thus a progressive discipline for which the future holds many exciting opportunities. The use of biosensors for the early diagnosis of diseases has become widely accepted as a point-of-care diagnosis with appropriate specificity in short time. To allow a reliable diagnosis of a disease at an early state, highly sensitive biosensors are required as the corresponding biomarkers are generally expressed at very low concentrations. In the past 50 years, various biosensors have been researched and developed encompassing a wide range of applications. This contrasts to the limited number of commercially available biosensors. When it comes to sensing of biomarkers with the required picomolar (pM) sensitivity for real time sensing of biological samples only a handful of sensing systems have been proposed, being often rather complex and costly. Lately, graphene-based materials have been considered as superior over other nanomaterials for the development of sensitive biosensors. The advantages of graphene based sensor interfaces are numerous, including enhanced surface loading of the desired ligand due to the high surface-to-volume ratio, excellent conductivity and small band gap beneficial for sensitive electrical and electrochemical read outs, as well as tuneable optical properties for optical read outs such as fluorescence and plasmonics. In this paper, we review the advances made in the last years on graphene based biosensors in the field of medical diagnosis Subject area: diagnostic