Biocompatible Enzymatic Roller Pens for Direct Writing of Biocatalytic Materials: Do-it-Yourself Electrochemical Biosensors

The development of enzymatic-ink-based roller pens for direct drawing of biocatalytic sensors, in general, and for realizing renewable glucose sensor strips, in particular, is described. The resulting enzymatic-ink pen allows facile fabrication of high-quality inexpensive electrochemical biosensors of any design by the user on a wide variety of surfaces having complex textures with minimal user training. Unlike prefabricated sensors, this approach empowers the end user with the ability of on-demand and on-site designing and fabricating of biocatalytic sensors to suit their specific requirement. The resulting devices are thus referred to as do-it-yourself sensors. The bioactive pens produce highly reproducible biocatalytic traces with minimal edge roughness. The composition of the new enzymatic inks has been optimized for ensuring good biocatalytic activity, electrical conductivity, biocompatibility, reproducible writing, and surface adherence. The resulting inks are characterized using spectroscopic, viscometric, electrochemical, thermal and microscopic techniques. Applicability to renewable blood glucose testing, epidermal glucose monitoring, and on-leaf phenol detection are demonstrated in connection to glucose oxidase and tyrosinase-based carbon inks. The do-it-yourself renewable glucose sensor strips offer a fresh, reproducible, low-cost biocatalytic sensor surface for each blood test. The ability to directly draw biocatalytic conducting traces even on unconventional surfaces opens up new avenues in various sensing applications in low-resource settings and holds great promise for diverse healthcare, environmental, and defense domains.