PART II: BIOSENSORS AND CIRCUITS
6
AFFINITY-BASED BIOSENSORS: STOCHASTIC MODELING AND FIGURES OF MERIT
Biosensors, broadly defined, are sensors specifically designed to identify and estimate biological analytes. Along with the advancement of the biotechnology industry, biosensor systems have also witnessed a significant growth not only in terms of the number of applications but also in robustness, accuracy, and cost-efficiency. The most prominent biosensor systems include metabolite testers (e.g., blood glucose monitoring sensors), DNA and protein microarrays, and a plethora of environmental sensors. In this chapter, we focus on affinity-based biosensors and provide a detailed description of the biophysical processes that occur within these platforms. Our primary focus is to examine the statistical and computational methods to model and simulate these processes. Based on our formulations, we will also propose figures of merits that can be used to evaluate and compare the performance of biosensors. One important motivation behind this approach is to connect the models and figures of merits to the front-end electronic interfaces that most biosensor platforms have.
6.1 MODELING BIOSENSORS: INTRODUCTION
Affinity-based biosensors use selective binding and interaction between certain biomolecules (recognition probes) and specific target analytes to determine the presence of the latter in the biological samples. The essential role of the ...
