Current trends in the development of conducting polymers-based biosensors

Abstract

Bioelectronics devices are seeing great improvement. After the earliest generations of sensors and biosensors, the current generation is attracting great interest due to the advantages that it showed. Despite the positive advantages, some drawbacks linked to the technologies used in the construction process are still seen. Therefore, the scientific community is giving its best to further develop the current biosensor knowledge and bypass the disadvantages seen before. In this review, we will be examining the current approaches taken by research in order to avoid the already seen drawbacks in sensors development. Many tools and methodologies are being used ranging from conducting polymers, conducting polymer nanowires, embedded metal nanoparticles in polymeric films, to conducting polymers synthesis in ionic liquids and polymeric ionic liquids. These approaches permitted the fabrication of highly simplistic and low-cost biosensors stressing on their potential in biological samples detection. The dynamic seen between polymers and protein opens the door to many possibilities to use novel materials or devising new techniques for the next generation biosensor systems. Despite all the efforts been made, the subject of modification of electrodes by chemical reactions is still a remarkable area of research activity. Hence, in this review, the considerable emphasis has been placed on the recent approaches of electrical active polymer modified electrodes specialized for application in biosensing devices and in particular amperometric biosensors.