A Portable Light-Excitation Equipped Bio-Amperometer for Electrogenic Biomaterials to Support the Technical Development of Most Biosensors

A portable multifunction amperometric transducer for monitoring bioactive material has been designed to operate with a wide range of electrogenic biosamples. The system realized is innovative, being designed to be flexible, modular and small, with two independent not-interfering sensing cells equipped with programmable optical excitation, current measurement system and automated flow system. Each of the two cells is provided with screen printed electrodes to measure the generated biocurrent and features different optical sources (LEDs with emission peak at 470nm and 660nm) to activate the photosynthetic electron transfer of various biomediators from plants and/or microorganisms. Target applications belong to the agro-food, pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. To demonstrate the large applicability of the transducer, experimental measurements were conducted with Photosystem II protein and tyrosinase to detect four different pesticides and cathecol, respectively. Further applications in environmental water monitoring and food analysis are envisaged for such biosensors.