ESR Personal Update - Meenu Selvaraj

Our ESR Meenu Selvaraj participated in the BioEl 2019 International Winter school on Bioelectronics in Tirol, Austria from the 16th-23 of March 2019. Together with other participants, she had the opportunity to make a poster presentation of her project work on the topic “Electrolyte-Gated organic field effect transistors (EGOFETs) for biosensor applications”, with the abstract of the presentation given below.

ABSTRACT

Electrolyte-gated organic field-effect transistors (EGOFETs) have emerged in the field of biosensors over the last five years, due to their attractive simplicity and high sensitivity to interfacial changes, both on the gate/electrolyte and semiconductor/electrolyte interfaces, where a target-specific bioreceptor can be immobilized. EGOFETs are a good alternative to conventional OFETs that are based on solid dielectrics whereas in EGOFET a liquid electrolyte (PBS buffer) acts as a dielectric medium where biomolecules can interact. High capacitance changes and low biasing voltage make EGOFETs ideal candidates for the next generation of biosensors, particularly suitable for the detection and quantification of biomarkers in purified plasma or serum. So in my presentation, I will explain the basic principles of electrolyte-gated organic field-effect transistors, and the functionalization process of the Gate electrodes using microfluidics.

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“During the Winter school, I was fascinated by talks from various speakers, in particular the talk from Prof. Dr. Tobbias Cramer (Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna (IT)), where he discussed how to investigate an organic bioelectronics interfaces by Multimodal Scanning Probe Microscopies. I would like to use this technique for my AiPBAND project, in order to understand and study the fundamental interactions across semiconductor/electrolyte interfaces. Another interesting talk was from Professor Dr.C.Daniel Frisbie (Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of Minnesota, USA). He discussed Electrolyte-Gated Transistors with Floating Gates as Biosensors. I am planning to test the same concept for my EGOFET (Electrolyte-Gated Organic field effect transistor) biosensor, specifically by using a primary- secondary electrolyte and also having floating/control gate conditions. In my current project I have only one electrolytic compartment where the biomolecules resides.”

Meenu Selvaraj, ESR-4 at Scriba Nanotechnologie S.r.l, Bologna and student in University of Catania Scriba Nanotechnologi (Italy)

Read Meenu's profile