Surface modification with nanomaterials for electrochemical biosensing application

Biosensors are one of the important analytical devices and global demand for the detection and treatment of diseases in modern health care. It has several attractive merits including high selectivity, cheaper, point-of-care detection, rapid, high throughput when compared to classical analytical devices. The biosensors devices are widely applied in different areas including medical, bio-defense, biopharma research, environmental, and food & beverage. The engineered nanomaterials are playing a key role in the successful development of biosensor device with an excellent analytical performance due to their special physicochemical characterization through versatile chemical functionalization. The different types of nanomaterials (zero, one-dimensional, 2-dimensional, and 3-dimensional) and nanofabrication tools (lithography, 3D-printing, sonochemical, solvothermal, physical/thermal vapor deposition, electrodeposition, and so on) have been applied in the area of biosensors in the past few decades. These nanomaterials have been primarily used in all type of biosensors as surface modifier over the transducer surface to improve the sensing performance. Owing to their special properties, the analyte molecules particularly interact with nanomaterials modified transducer for efficient conversion of bio-recognition event into a detectable analytical signal to achieve ultrasensitive detection. The intention of this book chapter is to explain the importance of nanomaterials in biosensor applications and types of modification of nanomaterials over transducer surface for electrochemical biosensor design for various applications and to address future aspects and current challenges of nanomaterials fabrication and modification in biosensor development.