Electrochemical Dna Biosensors At The Nanoscale

Electrochemical DNA biosensors at the nanometric scale have gained increasing attention in the last years. The high sensitivity, low cost and easy miniaturization of the electronic detection taken in conjunction with the wide range of applications that offers the detection of DNA, have made these devices a perfect analytical tool in different fields, such as diagnosis of genetic diseases, detection of infectious agents, study of genetic predisposition, development of personalized medicine, detection of differential genetic expression, forensic science, drug screening, food safety and environmental monitoring.Nanofabrication technologies have brought even more advantages to these kind of devices. The miniaturization of these biosensors contributes towards lesser time on diagnosis and reagents, as well as the reduction of costly preparation and analysis methods, which is of primary relevance in the case of the genosensor. It is expected that the use of nanotechnologies will end the still common preliminary step in most of the existing platforms, the long and expensive DNA amplification with PCR. But the main feature which makes nanobiotechnologies so attractive is the possibility of exploiting the ability of nanomaterials and nanopatterned devices to directly interact with biomolecules and to produce, in the ideal case, a direct readable signal of the interaction event.