Recent Trends in Nanobiosensors and Their Applications - a Review

Nanotechnology plays an important role in the development of biosensors. The sensitivity and performance of biosensors are improved by using nanomaterials through new signal transduction technologies. The development of tools and processes used to fabricate, measure and image nanoscale objects, has led to the development of sensors that interact with extremely small molecules that need to be analyzed. These advances are particularly exciting in the context of biosensing, where the demands are for low concentration detection and high specificity. The use of biomolecule-functionalized surfaces can drastically boost the specificity of the detection system, but may also pose reproducibility problems and increased complexity. Several nanobiosensor architecture-based mechanical devices, optical resonators, functionalized nanoparticles, nanowires, nanotubes, and nanofibers have been in use. As nanobiosensor technology becomes more refined and reliable, it will eventually make lab-on-a-chip devices for rapid screening of a wide variety of analyses at low cost. In particular, nanomaterials such as gold nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, magnetic nanoparticles and quantum dots have been actively investigated for their applications in biosensors, which have become a new interdisciplinary frontier between biological detection and material science. This paper reviews the status of the various nanostructure-based biosensors and their applications.