Biosensor regeneration via substrate electric potential: A physical mechanism

Abstract

Literatures showed that the immune type biosensors can be regenerated by applying a voltage (Δ) across the combined macromolecules but the underlying physics was not clarified. By incorporating an electric double layer force and a van der Waals force into a weight-ensemble Brownian dynamics simulation, we found that the dissociation rate constant for biotin-streptavidin increases exponentially with Δ, and reaches 418-fold when Δ equals 1 V. Macroscopic diffusion simulations using such enhanced dissociation rate constants agree with the previous experiments, and explain quantitatively the finding that the regeneration using square-wave voltage is superior to that using saw-tooth voltage. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.