Enzymatic Electrodes: Characteristics, Fabrication Methods, and Applications

Enzymes have been traditionally used for catalysis of selected reactions in numerous applications. In recent decades, their application in electrochemistry has been also investigated which helped to develop first enzymatic electrochemical biosensors. Nowadays, enzymatic electrochemical biosensors are being developed for applications in food industry, environment monitoring, human health, safety and medicine, pharmaceutics, and so on, most frequently, employing enzymes from a family of oxidoreductases. Upon their appropriate immobilization on a conductive electrode surface, their specific bioelectrocatalytic activity can be measured using standard electrochemical methods. In this article, main principles and fundamentals of electron transfers between oxidoreductases and electrode surfaces are briefly introduced. Further, methods for immobilization of these enzymes on electrode surfaces are discussed, and applications of enzyme-modified electrodes in biosensing, energy harvesting, and biologic computing are introduced. Integration of nanotechnologies for construction of these devices has proven to be crucial, which is also briefly reviewed in this article.