A Comparative Analysis of Iridium Oxide Nanowires in Electrical Detection of Biochemical Reactions

Pt, Ir, Au and few other precious metals have highly conducive electrical and chemical properties; hence have been widely used in pH sensors and bimolecular sensing applications. The chief objective of this research is to highlight and demonstrate the advantages that Iridium Oxide (IrOx) nanowires offer over these competing metals in improving the performance metrics of biomolecular sensing. Iridium oxide has very good conductivity and very high charge storing capacity, and hence has an ability to detect very small changes in the surface charge. Nanowires have an ideal morphology to crowd protein molecules and highly increase the surface area of interaction. Higher area of interaction along with iridium oxide's high intrinsic physical adsorption rate, strongly enhance the rate of immobilization of biomolecules and hence enabling high sensitivity detection. Inflammatory protein, C-Reactive protein (CRP) that is a biomarker for cardiovascular disease was used as the model biomolecule for this study.