A Low Spring Constant Piezoresistive Microcantilever for Biological Reagent Detection

Micromachines
Yuan TianXiaomei Yu

Abstract

This paper introduces a piezoresistive microcantilever with a low spring constant. The microcantilever was fabricated with titanium (Ti) as the piezoresistor, a low spring constant polyimide (PI) layer, and a thin silicon oxide (SiO2) layer as the top and bottom passive layers, respectively. Excellent mechanical performances with the spring constant of 0.02128 N/m and the deflection sensitivity (∆V/V)/∆z of 1.03 × 10-7 nm-1 were obtained. The output voltage fluctuation of a Wheatstone bridge, which consists of four piezoresistive microcantilevers, is less than 3 μV@3 V in a phosphate buffered saline (PBS) environment. A microcantilever aptasensor was then developed through functionalizing the microcantilevers with a ricin aptamer probe, and detections on ricin with concentrations of 10, 20, 50 and 100 ng/mL were successfully realized. A good specificity was also confirmed by using bovine serum albumin (BSA) as a blank control. The experiment results show that the Ti and PI-based microcantilever has great prospects for ultrasensitive biochemical molecule detections with high reliability and specificity.

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
AFM
chip
biosensor
electrophoresis

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