Ultrasensitive Electrochemical Biosensor Based on Noble Metal Nanomaterials

Ultrasensitive electrochemical biosensors are highly pursued in order to meet the growing demands and challenges in a large number of analytic applications such as medical diagnosis, food safety control, environmental monitoring, or even military defense. Noble metal nanomaterials (NMNMs) with special size-dependent chemical and physical properties show superior advantages and bring new concepts for biosensor construction. Over the past decade, researchers have devoted considerable attention to the integration of an electrochemical biosensor with NMNMs to yield high performance bioelectronic devices. A great deal of NMNMs based electrochemical biosensors have been reported and show promising practical performance. In this review, we focus on the recent progress of rational design and construct of high-performance electrochemical biosensors by employing advanced NMNMs. The performance of the electrochemical biosensor is highly dependent on the transducer principle and signal amplification strategy. NMNMs have good biocompatibility, a large active surface area, comparable size scale with typical biomolecules, as well as unique size-dependent chemical and physical properties, which make them act both as ideal transducer materials and signal amplification labels. The review focuses on NMNMs applications in electrochemical biosensors as transducer materials and signal amplification labels. Then the trend in fabrication novel NMNMs-based EC biosensor is outlooked. This review would be highly beneficial to understanding the relationship between the properties of NMNMs and the performance of electrochemical biosensors, and is necessary for the fabrication of NMNMs-based electrochemical biosensors with desired performance.