Nanofibrous membranes have found great successes as sensor media for detection of environmental hazards, especially in aerosol based and small target molecules, due to the special features of micro-sized porosity and ultrahigh specific surface areas. However, applications of the nanofibrous membranes in development of biosensors have experienced certain difficulties, mostly in relatively lower sensitivity than the speculated increases, though limited increase in sensitivity have been achieved. Most nanofibrous membranes are prepared by using the electrospinning method in a structure of stacked layers of nanofiber mats. Thus, the membranes have dimensionally heterogenous porosity, and pore sizes and distributions in the membranes vary significantly depending on different directions, mainly in the vertical direction. The pores along this direction of the membrane could have three different types, through pores, blind pores, and closed pores.  The through pores can allow particles to penetrate through the membrane, and the blind pores have closed ends that can block the diffusion of the particles.  The pore sizes of the membranes could be significantly reduced due to the stacked layers of nanofibers, resulting in a huge difference in sizes of measured pores and effective pores that contribute to diffusion of molecules through the membranes, especially large molecules such as proteins.  In the development of nanofibrous membrane-based enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) sensors for antibiotics, the effects of pore sizes and chemical natures of the membranes were demonstrated. Control of the structural features of the nanofibrous membranes could increase the sensitivity of the biosensors made of the membrane with two hundred times increase versus that made of the conventional paper-based ELISA. The results revealed the importance of membrane structures on sensitivity and applications of biosensors.

Structural features of nanofibrous membranes on developments of personal use biosensors

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