2023-11-24 18:45:32
Devices in our daily lives such as the mobile phone or cell phone are made of electronic components based on metals such as silicon and copper, as well as electrical insulators. The materials are essentially inorganic, that is, in a category separate from that of biological materials. What if some of these electronic components, for example transistors, were partially biological, with the ability to react directly to the environment and change accordingly, just as living tissue does?
That is what a team from Tufts University in the United States has done by creating transistors in which the insulating material has been replaced with biological silk.
The achievement is the work of the team of Fiorenzo Omenetto and Beom Joon Kim.
Silk fibroin (the structural protein of silk fibers) can be precisely deposited on surfaces and easily modified with other chemical and biological substances to change its properties. Silk arranged in this way can capture and detect a wide range of components in the body or environment.
In the first demonstration of a prototype device, the team has used hybrid transistors to make a highly sensitive and ultra-fast breath sensor that detects changes in humidity.
Hybrid biological transistors change their electronic behavior in response to gases and other substances in the environment. (Photo: Fio Omenetto, Silklab, Tufts University)
Other modifications to the silk layer could allow the devices to detect some cardiovascular and lung diseases, or capture the levels of carbon dioxide and other gases and substances present in the breath that could provide information suitable for making a diagnosis.
Used with blood plasma, they could provide information on oxygenation and glucose levels, circulating antibodies, and other things.
Omenetto and his colleagues present the technical details of their new hybrid transistors in the academic journal Advanced Materials, under the title “Bimodal gating mechanism in hybrid thin-film transistors based on dynamically reconfigurable nanoscale biopolymer interfaces.” (Source: NCYT from Amazings)
#Biology #electronics #hybrid #transistor