A photosynthetic biosensor with enhanced electron transfer generation realized by laser printing technology

One of the limits of current electrochemical biosensors is a lack of methods providing stable and highly efficient junctions between biomaterial and solid-state devices. This paper shows how laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) can enable efficient electron transfer from photosynthetic biomaterial immobilized on screen-printed electrodes (SPE). The ideal pattern, in terms of photocurrent signal of thylakoid droplets giving a stable response signal with a current intensity of approximately 335 +/- 13 nA for a thylakoid mass of 28 +/- 4 ng, was selected. It is shown that the efficiency of energy production of a photosynthetic system can be strongly enhanced by the LIFT process, as demonstrated by use of the technique to construct an efficient and sensitive photosynthesis-based biosensor for detecting herbicides at nanomolar concentrations.