This results in a voltage variation at the interface between the semiconductor and the liquid [20, 21]. Based on this principle, ZnO nanorods were used to fabricate a highly sensitive pH sensor on Femtotio® II capillaries to detect the intracellular pH of a human fat cell [22]. Other
authors [23] showed pH-sensing devices based on single ZnO nanorods with Ohmic contacts at either ends, exhibiting slight changes in current (about 5 nA at 0.5 V per pH unit) upon exposing the surface to liquid electrolytes. The device sensitivity was also enhanced by exposing ZnO to UV light, thus increasing the measured conductance at find more a certain pH with respect to the same experiment under dark conditions. Here, we report on a large increase of the current in the order of microampere at 2 V (or
of one order of magnitude of the conductance at 0.75 V) measured from a single ZnO microwire, in response to a reduction from neutral to acid pH. This enhanced response was significantly higher than those reported in the previous literature and was obtained thanks to the functionalization of the ZnO wires with a shell of aminopropyl groups (ZnO-NH2), which are highly responsive to pH variation due to protonation/deprotonation mechanism of the ending -NH2 group (Lazertinib datasheet Figure 1). The functional wires were aligned by dielectrophoresis among eight nanogap gold electrode array chips. This resulted in eight parallel gold-ZnO-gold junctions at the same time on a single chip integrated selleck chemicals llc on a ready-to-use electronic platform. We measured a remarkable change of the current as a function of the solution pH and the acid concentration in contact with the chip, as a result of the ion-induced changes of the surface potential of our ZnO-functionalized wires. The simulations of the experiment confirmed our results. We also compared this behavior to the non-functionalized ZnO wires deposited
on the same electronic platform and to the literature results on ZnO [23], thus showing the superiority in pH response of our amine-functionalized material. The amine groups are often used as further anchoring moieties Telomerase for molecules or metals having biological [24–26], catalytic [27, 28], imaging [29], or optical purposes [30]. Therefore, these results suggest that amine-functionalized ZnO structures deposited on an electrode array chip can be a very promising platform for a wide variety of sensing applications. The innovation of the presented approach lies in the integration of the single amine-functionalized wires on a nanogap electrode chip and the parallel current–voltage characterization and pH sensing measurements of the eight ZnO-gold junctions. This can be the first step toward a smart and portable micro-chip sensor [31].