Laser Scribing Turns Plastic Waste into a Biosensor via the Restructuration of Nanocarbon Composites for Noninvasive Dopamine Detection
Jagadeesh Suriyaprakash, Yang Huang, Zhifei Hu, Hao Wang, Yiyu Zhan, Yangtao Zhou, Indumathi Thangavelu, Lijun Wu
Abstract
The development of affordable and compact noninvasive point-of-care (POC) dopamine biosensors for the next generation is currently a major and challenging problem. In this context, a highly sensitive, selective, and low-cost sensing probe is developed by a simple one-step laser-scribing process of plastic waste. A flexible POC device is developed as a prototype and shows a highly specific response to dopamine in the real sample (urine) as low as 100 pmol/L in a broad linear range of 10−10–10−4 mol/L. The 3D topological feature, carrier kinetics, and surface chemistry are found to improve with the formation of high-density metal-embedded graphene-foam composite driven by laser irradiation on the plastic-waste surface. The development of various kinds of flexible and tunable biosensors by plastic waste is now possible thanks to the success of this simple, but effective, laser-scribing technique, which is capable of modifying the matrix’s electronic and chemical composition.