Nano-Bio Electrochemical Interfacing–Linking Cell Biology and Micro-Electronics

Integration of biological substance within electronic devices is an innovative and challenging area combining recent progress in molecular biology and micro technology. First, we introduce the concept of integrating living cells with Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). Following a brief overview on “whole cell based biosensors” we describe the design, fabrication, and process of a biocompatible electrochemical “Lab-on-a-Chip” system. Demonstrating the application of electrochemical interfacing based whole cell bio chips, we present two different configurations: a. integration of prokaryotic cells (bacteria) for water toxicity detection, and b. integration of eukaryotic cells (human colon cancer cells) for rapid evaluation of the effectiveness of drug treatments. Both applications, with either microbes or mammalian cells integrated onto MEMS based biochips with liquid volume in the range of 100 nL–1 μL, function well and yield a detectable signal much higher than noise level after few minutes.