New Trends in Design and Development of Optical Nano-Biosensors

Nanotechnology is currently playing a significant role in the development of biosensors. The sensitivity and performance of biosensors improves drastically by incorporating nanomaterials and adopting new signal transduction technologies. With the rapid development of tools and fabrication processes , nanoscale sensors capable of interacting with extremely small molecules have been developed. These advancements are important since such biosensors cater to research sectors where detection of low concentration analyte is desired. Furthermore, the use of highly sensitive surfaces such as biomolecule-functionalized surfaces can boost the specificity of the detection system. At the same time, reproducibility problems may arise besides increased complexity. In the current scenario, several nanobiosensor architecture-based mechanical devices, optical resonators, functionalized nanoparticles, nanowires, nanotubes, and nanofibers are being used. With the rapid advancements in the nanobiosensor technology, more refined and reliable lab-on-a-chip devices for rapid screening of a wide variety of analyses at low cost are in pipeline. More specifically, nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes, magnetic nanoparticles , gold nanoparticles and quantum dots have been actively investigated for their applications in biosensors, which have become a new bridge between biological detection and material science. This paper reviews the characteristics of Optical nano-biosensors and discusses a Novel Technique of embedding an NMOS Phototransistor on a silicon photonics platform the various nanostructure-based biosensors with a general perspective of design optimization.